SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY. Anthropology is the science of man and of his culture at various levels of development. It includes the study of the human frame, of racial distinctions, of civilisation, of social structure and of man's mental reactions to his environment. The problems connected with the human body, such as race, heredity, miscegenation, are the subject matter of Physical Anthropology. Social, called also Cultural Anthropology, studies questions of the culture and social organisation of primi tive tribes and nations. As a rule a somewhat vague line of demarcation is drawn between peoples of simpler culture and those more highly developed, such as the modern inhabitants of Europe and N. America. The study of higher civilisations is then assigned to Sociology. The distinction, however, is unsatis factory and it would be more correct to say that Social Anthro pology is a branch of Sociology, as applied to primitive tribes. Since the study of living peoples uses methods and controls sources of information entirely different from those at the dis posal of archaeology and pre-history, Social Anthropology has to restrict its scope to the study of the modern living representatives of primitive mankind.
Social Anthropology begins really with a pre-scientific interest in the strange customs and beliefs of distant and barbarous peoples, and in this form it is as old, at least, as the Father of History. Indeed traces of such pre-scientific interest can be found in the early inscriptions, paintings, reliefs and sacred writ ings of the Orient and even in the quaint and highly coloured stories which one primitive tribe tells of another. We have not yet succeeded in eliminating this cruder curiosity in "Ye Beastly Devices of Ye Heathen" from modern anthropology, where the thirst for the romantic, the sensational and the thrilling still plays some havoc with the sober scientific attitude.
In the establishment of this latter and of sound methods of research the lead in Great Britain was taken by General Pitt Rivers E. B. Tylor, J. F. MacLennan and J. Lubbock (Lord Avebury) ; in Germany by A. Bastian and even earlier by Herder, Grimm and the Volker-psychologists; in France by Boucher de Perthes and Perrault.