For these sound reasons official science long looked askance on 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, Puysegur, 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 the later works of Mr. Max Mueller, the echo of the old complaints.  Anything you please, Mr. Max Mueller says, you may find among your useful savages, and (in regard to some anthropologists) his criticism is just.  You have but to skim a few books of travel, pencil in hand, and pick out what suits your case.  Suppose, as regards our present theme, your theory is that savages possess broken lights of the belief in a Supreme Being.  You can find evidence for that.  Or suppose you want to show that they have no religious ideas at all; you can find evidence for that also.  Your testimony is often derived from observers ignorant of the language of the people whom they talk about, or who are themselves prejudiced by one or other theory or bias.  How can you pretend to raise a science on such foundations, especially as the savage informants wish to please or to mystify inquirers, or they answer at random, or deliberately conceal their most sacred institutions, or have never paid any attention to the subject?