Science Progress, that excellent quarterly, in its April number (Murray,
6s. net) has an instructive paper by Sir J. G. Frazer on " The Scope and Methods of Mental Anthropology." He would set up at Cambridge a central bureau or clearing-house to receive reports from observers all over the world and to send out questions, hints and theories that would stimulate further inquiry. He points out that the anthropologist can perhaps throw light on the problems that vex modern society. If we knew more of the origins of society, of the beginnings of govern- ment, of the way in which the first instinct of private property took shape among men, we should be able to approach the question of Socialism from a new angle. Some of Sir James Frazer's fellow-scholars would hotly dispute this assumption, but it seems reasonable to suppose that a fuller knowledge of primitive man would clarify some of our controversies, inasmuch as the nature of man has changed very little through the ages of recorded history.
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