MAN AND MONKEY

Mr. Donald Scott's annual report on the activities of the Peabody Museum indicates the extent and diversification of Harvard's anthropological research. A Boston newspaper's headline, pointing to Tibet and Chelsea, Massachusetts as marking the division's scope of study, gives an accurate idea of this diversification. The various scenes of investigation, however, do not mean that the Museum lacks a unified objective, which, as Mr. Scott explains, is to assemble complete series of data which will illustrate such occurrences "as the spread of Paleolithic and neolithic man over all three continents of the Old World."

Toward these ends, a survey of the Irish race has been made, including measurements of ten thousand males and two thousand females. Irish excavations throwing light upon the neolithic period were made at Larne, County Antrim, as well as others at Lagore and Creevykeel. Skeletons were studied by Dr. W. W. Howells, and sociological data analyzed by Doctors Arensburg and Kimball.

Farther to the east, Dr. Gordon T. Bowles and his wife have secured anthropometric data on five thousand individuals in the Indian foothill area. The particular purpose of this survey was to analyze racial origins and migrations along the significant borderland of India and Tibet, the investigation extending from the extreme northwest to Assam and Burma.

In the Americas, equally important work has been done in the past year. Mr. J. O. Brew and his expedition, in north central Arizona, found clues throwing light on the history of the Hopi Indians of the Southwest. The present program in this area will, if successful, present a connected picture of the region from the early Christian era to the burning of Awatovi, the ruin now being excavated, in 1700. Into Honduras, near the Maya empire, Harvard and the Smithsonian Institute sent a party which has discovered pottery from Lake Yojoa.

In addition to these major expeditions, the Museum investigated, among others, Australians, Siamese, Armenians, Chelsea school children, and the neolithic period in the Near East. In the last-named undertaking, the Geology, Botany, and Zoology departments cooperated, and an effort is being made to do intensive research in this region.

The farflung study of the Museum is indicative of the important work Harvard is doing in fields of scientific research, and is a part of the University with which the casual undergraduate rarely comes in contact. The implications of this work are no less great for common ignorance of it. Field work and first hand study are of the utmost necessity to the perpetuating of living knowledge, as the discovery of primary sources alone can keep the business of education and civilization headed upward. It is toward these broad objectives that the Peabody Museum expeditions have bent their efforts.