Anthropology As a Science and as a Branch of University Education in the United States — Themes and Context

A Science Defined by Its Syllabus

The bulk of the text is not argument but enumeration. Brinton presents anthropology as a composite of somatology, ethnology, ethnography, archæology, and linguistics, each with subfields laid out in outline form. The syllabus for 'Somatology' includes 'Measuring skulls,' 'Dissections of anthropoids,' and 'Study of embryology and teratology.' The technological laboratory covers 'stone implements; simple and compound; rough and polished; primary and secondary chipping; cleavage; firing; bulb of percussion.' This taxonomic density is the work's primary evidence: Brinton is not describing a discipline that exists but prescribing one that must be built from the ground up. The lists function as a blueprint, and their specificity—down to 'methods of making casts and models; taking squeezes, rubbings, copies, and photographs'—reveals a mind that has already imagined the physical space of a department.

The Rhetoric of Earnest Appeal

Brinton's voice shifts between the impersonal authority of a syllabus and the urgent first-person of a petitioner. In the prefatory note he writes, 'I make an earnest appeal to our seats of advanced learning,' and later, 'I do not plead for any one institution, or locality, or individual.' The repetition of 'I' in a text otherwise dominated by lists and classifications is striking. It suggests a personal stake—Brinton was a professor of American archæology and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania—and a frustration that his field lacked the infrastructure of older sciences. The closing question, 'Who is the enlightened and liberal citizen ready to found such a department?' is a direct challenge to the reader, one that the preceding pages have tried to make irresistible by showing exactly what such a department would do.

A Curriculum of Hands-On Practice

Brinton insists that anthropology cannot be learned from books alone. His proposed curriculum includes a 'Physical Laboratory,' a 'Technological Laboratory,' 'Library Work,' and 'Field Work.' The laboratory sections are particularly vivid: students would practice 'reducing unknown tongues to writing, by the ear' and 'the repetition of unfamiliar phonetic elements.' They would study 'the actions of the lingual muscles in the production of sounds.' Field work involves 'surveying, photographing, and plotting ancient remains' and 'excavating rock-shelters and caverns.' This emphasis on practical training—on doing, not just reading—is the most concrete argument Brinton makes for why anthropology deserves its own department. It is a science that requires tools, specimens, and space, and he is determined to show exactly what those tools are.

Brinton's text is best read as a period piece in the history of American higher education—a snapshot of a discipline fighting for legitimacy through sheer taxonomic exhaustiveness. The reader interested in how academic fields are constructed will find more evidence in the syllabi than in the argument. The work's value lies not in its conclusions but in its assumptions: that a science can be proven by its curriculum, and that a university chair is the highest form of recognition. Brinton's earnestness, his lists, and his unanswered question remain as artifacts of a moment when anthropology was still defining itself.

Brinton’s lectures stayed with me, not as a syllabus, but as a kind of quiet map of how we began to ask who we are. There was something tender in his trying to hold all of it together. That same ache—wanting to organize what keeps slipping—lives in Anthropology — Story, Setting & Ideas, a gentler retelling of that very struggle.