ourselves by training and criticism nearer to the centre of things, more
intimate with essential factors and remote from the trivial periphery;
but it is a matter of degree, and historical study an affair after all
of mental triangulation. Like a surveyor in the field, we are safest in
our determination of any third position if we have already knowledge of
two, and of how the third looks from both of them. And even if we were
indeed at the centre of things, I suppose we might take our round of
angles quite uselessly, unless we had also some divine gift of judging
distances.

So the historian accepts his limitations as the rules of the game,
and sets out to see unity askance. It is his rare chance, if events
shift _him_, and set him gazing at a world in which, as now, half
his own career is inside the picture; not perhaps very easy to
find in a moment--as one might fail to recognize oneself in a
group-photograph--but none the less there, and intelligible only in
relation to its actual surroundings.

Looking back, indeed, over the course of anthropology and prehistoric
archaeology, much of which lies in the years since 1870, and nearly all
of it since 1815, the first thing which strikes us now is the frequency
and delicacy of its response to contemporary thoughts and aspirations. A
few of the greatest men have recognized this at the time. I quote from
Karl Ernst von Baer, the founder of comparative embryology, and in great
matters the master of men as different as Huxley, Spencer, and Francis
Balfour. He died in 1876, when political anthropology was still young;
but in his great book on Man he 'appeals to the experience of all
countries and ages, that if a people has power, and attempts wrongdoing
against another, it also does not omit to conceive the other as very
worthless and incompetent, and to repeat this conviction often and