Dr Allan Carroll and the ‘Science of Man’

Abstract

In 1926 the English socialist reformer Beatrice Webb (1858-1943) was able to look back with some nostalgia to a time in the 1880s when it was believed that 'by science alone all human misery would be ultimately swept away'. Enthusiasm for science was by no means limited to England, Europe and North America. In Australia too there were those who vigorously praised and promoted the new scientific ideas becoming popular in the later years of the nineteenth century and in the the first decade of the twentieth. One such local enthusiast was Dr Allan Carroll (1823-1911). In June 1903, Dr Carroll was situated in Pitt Street Sydney in the office of an organisation, the Anthropological Society of Australasia, after 1900 known as the Royal Anthropological Society of Australasia, which he had founded in 1893 to promote anthropology. Its other stated aim was to press for the scientific study of human development and for this purpose an offshoot, the Laboratory Association of Australasia came into being, and concomitantly to further the cause the study of children in which Carroll had an life-long interest, the Child Study Association of Australasia. '