100 YEARS AGO

Are they not methodologically equivalent, the three systems of classification — (a) of plants into herbs, shrubs and trees; (b) of animals into birds, beasts and fishes; and (c) of humans into the sanguine, the lymphatic, the bilious and the melancholy? Why, then, is it that science, having long ago given us a Systema Naturae and a nomenclature botanicus and zoologicus, still leaves us almost without the rudiments of a Systema Hominis and a nomenclature sociologicus? It may be asked in reply, What of the anthropologists and their half-century of taxonomic labours in the name of science? But the anthropological classifications belong, in appearance at least, to natural and not human history. They do not rise through psychology into sociology... Of late the anthropologist has shown signs of attaching himself to the psychologist; and this suggests another form of the initial question, Why have anthropologists not endeavoured to formulate even a provisional classification of psychological types? Why have they, with unconscious naïvete, been content to accept implicitly the popular classification that traditionally survives from early Greek thought? To this question the positivist will be ready with his answer, but perhaps it were wiser to leave it as a shameful reminder to the laggard sociologist.

From Nature 8 September 1904.

50 YEARS AGO

The passing of Prof. T. F. Dreyer has deprived the study of early man in South Africa of one of its acknowledged leaders, and his place will not be easily filled. Outside South Africa, Prof. Dreyer will be most widely remembered as the discoverer of the Florisbad skull, the most remarkable human fossil to be found in Africa since the Broken Hill skull. This discovery was a well-deserved reward for his intuition in selecting for thorough investigation the Florisbad mineral spring deposits with their wealth of archæological and fossil mammalian remains. But his explorations in the Matjes River Cave and elsewhere also constitute notable contributions to our knowledge of man in South Africa from prehistoric to historic times. With a characteristic scorn for the compartmenting of knowledge, Prof. Dreyer pursued his studies simultaneously in the field of physical anthropology, Quaternary mammalian palæontology, archæology and even Quaternary geology and climatology.

From Nature 11 September 1954.