“Ethnology”, for a long time, was generally used as a synonym of “Ethnography” understood as the Natural History of Man. But it took pioneering works, like the present one, to extend to Ethnology a far more extended and comprehensive definition – to include the whole mental and physical history of the various types of Mankind, as well as their social relations and adaptations.

The book, when first published, was a bold attempt to have Ethnology recognised to be a new and an important science. It provides answers the some of the basic demands of the science–
– what was the primitive organic structure of each race?
– what were such race’s moral and psychical characters?
– how far a race may have been, or may become, modified by the combined action of time and moral and physical causes?
– and what position in the social scale Providence has assigned to each type of man?

Although the subject has been revolutionised in the past century, but the works like this one still afford an opportunity to understand the evolution and development of the subject.