Abstract
IT is fitting that some reference should be made in these columns to the fact that it was just fifty years ago that Mr. Edward Clodd, the veteran scientific thinker, happily still with us, published his first book, “The Childhood of the World.” In 1920, at the advanced age of eighty, he published his “Magic in Names.” In the period which elapsed between the appearance of these two books, Mr. Clodd devoted the leisure of a busy life of affairs to scientific research in branches of study connected with the physical and mental evolution of man. The results were embodied in a number of volumes dealing with various aspects of this central problem, of which the principal are: “The Childhood of Religion,” 1875; “Myths and Dreams,” 1885; “The Story of Creation,” 1888; “The Story of Primitive Man,” 1895; “A Primer of Evolution,” 1895 “Tom Tit Tot,” 1898, perhaps his best known and most enduring work; “The Story of the Alphabet,” 1900; and “Animism,” in 1906. In addition he produced monographs on his friends and associates-Bates, of Amazon fame, Grant Allen (1900), Huxley (1902), and a volume of “Memories” published in 1916. Mr. Ciodd was one of a band of workers, of whom Huxley and Tylor were the best known, and who now, unfortunately, have nearly all passed away. To their untiring efforts to promote and popularise anthropology, its present position as a serious branch of scientific study is almost entirely due. Those of a younger generation who were first introduced to the evolutionary point of view in the study of man and of his religion and mental concepts through the lucid exposition and power of logical demonstration of which Mr. Clodd is a rhaster, owe to him a debt of gratitude which is not likely to be forgotten.
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Current Topics and Events. Nature 111, 369–372 (1923). https://doi.org/10.1038/111369a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/111369a0