Alexander Francis Chamberlain

“ Brinton, who in 1886 had been vice-president of the Anthropological Section, to the presidency of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for the year 1894, was a deserved and fitly bestowed honor. His retiring address on “The Aims of Anthropology” was a masterly and thoroughly sympathetic presentation of the raison d’être of the science, and of the unitary concept of the human race and its manifold phenomena, physical, mental, and spiritual. No devotee of Anthropology ever held higher ideals of the science, whose servant he was, than did Dr. ”

“ A people is but the attempt of many
To rise to the completer thought of one.
In an article in the “Forum” for December, 1893, Dr. Brinton discussed, in characteristic fashion, “The Origin of Man,” inclining to look upon the human race, like genius itself, as a “sport.”
When, therefore, in 1886, Dr. Brinton was awarded—the first American to be so honored—the medal of the Société Américaine de France for his “numerous and learned works on American Ethnology,” the prize was well allotted. Dr. ”

“ This book and the researched of the Bureau of Ethnology are the pathfinders for the student to-day. Dr. Brinton’s original contributions in the “American Race” were the definition of many hitherto unrecognized linguistic stocks, and the clearing away a good deal of the fog raised by the early chroniclers. In 1892 appeared “Studies in South American Languages” (Philadelphia, 1882, pp. 62) , consisting of essays previously published in the “Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society,” where were published also, 1897-98, several other studies on the same subject. ”

“ The world has seen, perhaps, few scientific geniuses who have had nothing of the poet in them. The literary finish of much of Dr. Brinton’s best works, his “love of song and story,”—the man himself in fact,—suggested more than once some knowledge of the Muse’s art. It was hardly a surprise, therefore, when his studies of Browning, few of which ever saw print, were followed, in 1897, by an original poem of no little merit,—the “swan song” of the genius. In “Maria Candelaria: An Historical Drama from American Aboriginal Life” (Philadelphia, 1897) , his last book, Dr. ”

“ He also sought with considerable success to show that northwest Africa was the primitive home of the Aryo-Semitic race, to whom, and not to any Mongolian or Negro peoples, are really due all the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean. ”