ABSTRACT
At the same time that Boas was building up the first doctoral programme in anthropology in the United States, at Columbia University, the first undergraduate and postgraduate courses in the discipline were being established in Britain, in the heartland of the natural sciences, at Cambridge University, by Alfred Cort Haddon, a zoologist, and a neurophysiologist, W. H. R. Rivers. The fact that Haddon and Rivers were scientists distinguished them from the lawyers and classicists who had formed the first generation of British anthropologists. Both men regarded anthropology as an undeveloped branch of the natural sciences, and one in crying need of scientific methods. Haddon would one day proudly inform the Senate of Cambridge University that ‘in some respects Cambridge led the whole world in improving Anthropological methods. Certain methods introduced by Dr Rivers had revolutionised the study of Anthropology.’1Rivers himself told his student Layard that he hoped his tombstone would bear the inscription, ‘He made ethnology a science’.2
