SOURCE: "Edward Alexander Westermarck and the Application of Ethnographic Methods to Marriage and Morals," in An Introduction to the History of Sociology, edited by Harry Elmer Barnes, The University of Chicago Press, 1948, pp. 654-67.

In the following excerpt, Mills draws comparisons between Westermarck's work and the writings of Sir Henry Maine and Charles Darwin.

I. the Life and Works of Westermarck

It depends on the definition into which the tally is made, but, not counting hillbillies, peasants, and folksocieties, there are something under one hundred major cultural types of nonliterate people on the globe today. Since the eighteenth century they have been "data" for social thinkers. Exhausting work, good minds, and a lot of money have been spent in exploiting them. Many of their languages have been learned. Detailed graphs have been constructed of their family and social organization. They have been lived among. Thin, mensurative instruments have...