Bastian, ADOLF

Bastian, ADOLF, German traveller and anthropologist, born at Bremen, 26th June 1826, studied at Berlin, Heidelberg, Prague, Jena, and Würzburg, and in 1851 sailed for Australia as a ship's doctor, thereafter travelling in North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and where not else besides. No equally well-equipped ethnologist has ever travelled so widely, and no single observer has accumulated such a mass of invaluable materials for the history of man. It would be difficult to overestimate the indebtedness of the science of anthropology to the practised eye of one restless traveller. His thirty works record his observations in almost as many countries of the world. The most important are in Der Mensch in der Geschichte (3 vols. 1860), Die Völker des östlichen Asien (6 vols. 1866-71), Ethnologische Forschungen (2 vols. 1871-73), Schöpfung oder Entstehung (1875), Die Vorstellungen von der Seele (1875), Vorgeschichte der Ethnologie (1881), Zur Naturwissenschaftlichen Behandlung der Psychologie (1883), Allgemeine Grundzüge der Ethnologie (1884), Religionsphilosophische Probleme (1884), and Der Fetisch an der Küste Guineas (1885). Berlin is his headquarters, and in 1869 he undertook the joint-editorship with Virchow and R. Hartmann of the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie.