Anthropology. Her followers were not regarded as genuine scholars, and,
perhaps as a result of this contempt, they were often 'broken men,'
intellectual outlaws, people of one wild idea. To the scientific mind,
anthropologists or ethnologists were a horde who darkly muttered of
serpent worship, phallus worship, Arkite doctrines, and the Ten Lost
Tribes that kept turning up in the most unexpected places. Anthropologists
were said to gloat over dirty rites of dirty savages, and to seek reason
where there was none. The exiled, the outcast, the pariah of Science, is,
indeed, apt to find himself in odd company. Round the camp-fire of
Psychical Research too, in the unofficial, unstaked waste of Science,
hover odd, menacing figures of Esoteric Buddhists, _Satanistes_,
Occultists, Christian Scientists, Spiritualists, and Astrologers, as the
Arkites and Lost Tribesmen haunted the cradle of anthropology.

But there was found at last to be reason in the thing, and method in the
madness. Evolution was in it. The acceptance, after long ridicule, of
palaeolithic weapons as relics of human culture, probably helped to bring
Anthropology within the sacred circle of permitted knowledge. Her topic
was full of illustrations of the doctrine of Mr. Darwin. Modern writers on
the theme had been anticipated by the less systematic students of the
eighteenth century--Goguet, de Brosses, Millar, Fontenelle, Lafitau,
Boulanger, or even Hume and Voltaire. As pioneers these writers answer to
the early mesmerists and magnetists, Puységur, Amoretti, Ritter,
Elliotson, Mayo, Gregory, in the history of Psychical Research. They
were on the same track, in each case, as Lubbock, Tylor, Spencer,
Bastian, and Frazer, or as Gurney, Richet, Myers, Janet, Dessoir, and Von
Schrenck-Notzing. But the earlier students were less careful of method and
evidence.

Evidence! that was the stumbling block of anthropology. We still hear, in