Anthropology, that is to say the science that treats of man, is divided ordinarily and with reason into Anatomy,
which
considers the body and the parts, and Psychology, which speaks of the soul.[n 3]
Sporadic use of the term for some of the subject matter occurred subsequently, such as the use by Étienne Serres in
1839 to describe the natural history, or paleontology, of man, based on comparative anatomy, and the creation of a
chair in anthropology and ethnography in 1850 at the French National Museum of Natural History by Jean Louis
Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau. Various short-lived organizations of anthropologists had already been formed.
The Société Ethnologique de Paris, the first to use Ethnology, was formed in 1839. Its members were primarily anti-
slavery activists. When slavery was abolished in France in 1848 the Société was abandoned.
Meanwhile, the Ethnological Society of New York, currently the American Ethnological Society, was founded on its
model in 1842, as well as the Ethnological Society of London in 1843, a break-away group of the Aborigines'
Protection Society.[9] These anthropologists of the times were liberal, anti-slavery, and pro-human-rights
activists. They maintained international connections.
Anthropology and many other current fields are the intellectual results of the comparative methods developed in the
earlier 19th century. Theorists in such diverse fields as anatomy, linguistics, and Ethnology, making feature-by-
feature comparisons of their subject matters, were beginning to suspect that similarities between animals, languages,
and folkways were the result of processes or laws unknown to them then.[10] For them, the publication of Charles
Darwin's On the Origin of Species was the epiphany of everything they had begun to suspect. Anthropologists
generally regard Herodotus, a Greek historian who lived in the 400s bc, as the first thinker to write widely on concepts
that would later become central to anthropology.
Darwin and Wallace unveiled evolution in the late 1850s. There was an immediate rush to bring it into the social
sciences. Paul Broca in Paris was in the process of breaking away from the Société de biologie to form the first of the
explicitly anthropological societies, the Société d'Anthropologie de Paris, meeting for the first time in Paris in 1859.[11][n
4]
When he read Darwin, he became an immediate convert to Transformisme, as the French called evolutionism.[12] His
definition now became "the study of the human group, considered as a whole, in its details, and in relation to the rest
of nature".[13]
Broca, being what today would be called a neurosurgeon, had taken an interest in the pathology of speech. He
wanted to localize the difference between man and the other animals, which appeared to reside in speech. He
discovered the speech center of the human brain, today called Broca's area after him. His interest was mainly
in Biological anthropology, but a German philosopher specializing in psychology, Theodor Waitz, took up the theme
of general and social anthropology in his six-volume work, entitled Die Anthropologie der Naturvölker, 1859–1864.
The title was soon translated as "The Anthropology of Primitive Peoples". The last two volumes were published
posthumously.
Waitz defined anthropology as "the science of the nature of man". Following Broca's lead, Waitz points out that
anthropology is a new field, which would gather material from other fields, but would differ from them in the use of
comparative anatomy, physiology, and psychology to differentiate man from "the animals nearest to him". He
stresses that the data of comparison must be empirical, gathered by experimentation.[14] The history of civilization, as
well as ethnology, are to be brought into the comparison. It is to be presumed fundamentally that the species, man, is
a unity, and that "the same laws of thought are applicable to all men".[15]
Waitz was influential among the British ethnologists. In 1863 the explorer Richard Francis Burton and the speech
therapist James Hunt broke away from the Ethnological Society of London to form the Anthropological Society of
London, which henceforward would follow the path of the new anthropology rather than just ethnology. It was the 2nd
society dedicated to general anthropology in existence. Representatives from the French Société were present,
though not Broca. In his keynote address, printed in the first volume of its new publication, The Anthropological
Review, Hunt stressed the work of Waitz, adopting his definitions as a standard.[16][n 5] Among the first associates were
the young Edward Burnett Tylor, inventor of cultural anthropology, and his brother Alfred Tylor, a geologist.
Previously Edward had referred to himself as an ethnologist; subsequently, an anthropologist.
Similar organizations in other countries followed: The Anthropological Society of Madrid (1865), the American
Anthropological Association in 1902, the Anthropological Society of Vienna (1870), the Italian Society of Anthropology
and Ethnology (1871), and many others subsequently. The majority of these were evolutionist. One notable exception
was the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory (1869) founded by Rudolph Virchow, known for
his vituperative attacks on the evolutionists. Not religious himself, he insisted that Darwin's conclusions lacked
empirical foundation.
During the last three decades of the 19th century, a proliferation of anthropological societies and associations
occurred, most independent, most publishing their own journals, and all international in membership and association.
The major theorists belonged to these organizations. They supported the gradual osmosis of anthropology curricula
into the major institutions of higher learning. By 1898, 48 educational institutions in 13 countries had some curriculum
in anthropology. None of the 75 faculty members were under a department named anthropology.[17]
