An Ethnologist's View of History

To understand them they must be studied in connection and causation. Hence, the method of the ethnologist becomes that which in the natural sciences is called the "developmental" method. It may be defined as the historic method where history is lacking. The biologist explains the present structure of an organ by tracing it back to simpler forms in lower animals until he reaches the germ from which it began. The ethnologist pursues the same course. He selects, let us say, a peculiar institution, such as caste, and when he loses the traces of its origin through failure of written records, he seeks for them in the survivals of unwritten folk-lore, or in similar forms in primit