History Of Anthropology eBook

Aristotle, “the father of them that know,” as Dante called him, is credited with having coined the word “anthropologist”; but he did not employ it in a very complimentary sense. Describing a lofty-minded man in his Ethics, he terms him ουκ ανθρωπολογος—not a gossip, not a talker about himself. But the word does not seem to have supplied a permanent want in the Greek world, and we meet it next in a Latin form in the sixteenth century. Anthropologium was then used in a restricted sense, relating to man’s bodily structure; and the first work in which it occurs is generally stated to be Magnus Hundt’s Anthropologium de hominis dignitate, which appeared in 1501, and dealt in a general way with human anatomy and physiology.