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competitors for the distinction of making a very narrow abstrac- tion stretch to the utmost extension as a total explanation. The prestige of the ethnological view rests, however, upon very pre- carious support. Whether genetic laws large enough to explain any single historical movement have been demonstrated within the field of ethnology proper is open to serious question. Much that passes for severe ethnological science is merely ingenious speculation. Even if it is proved that races have been the vehicles of influences which have affected different societies in different ways, it remains to be proved that the racial element was cause rather than effect of this influence, or of some other which was a more important cause. Moreover, many of the theorems of racial influence are theses in psychics rather than in physiology or zoology. They are dogmas in folk-psychology, not data or results of ethnology at all.
In this connection the most prominent ethnologists have failed to clarify their ideas. Such men as Topinard in France and Tylor in England and Brinton in this country have performed some grotesque straddles by defining ethnology as a physical science and then including in it every manifestation of man's complex nature. They have seemed to be uncertain, and they have surely left their readers uncertain, whether they were dis- covering physical traits, and then showing how these lend them- selves to industrial and cultural development; or whether they were starting with mental developments and were reasoning back to differences of physical traits sufficient to account for the phe- nomena. In other words, the most eminent ethnologists have not yet shown themselves such patient investigators of the facts within their own field that their conclusions have had a very profound effect upon laymen, especially those who are experts in other branches of physical science. This is likely to grow less and less true since more carefully trained scholars are enter- ing the ethnological field. The work of many of these, however, tends to the opposite extreme of mere description and classifica- tion of details, from which no general truth of large dimensions emerges. Hence the recent differentiation of the folk-psy- chologists. They are really only ethnologists of a new type
