336 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



It is eminently desirable that these statements should be verified, 

 for the doubts which have been thrown, to some extent justly, upon 

 various attempts to judge the age of the alluvium of the Nile do not 

 affect the proof of the relative antiquity of the human occupation of 

 Egypt, which such facts would afford ; and it is useless to speculate 

 on the antiquity of the Egyptian race, or the condition of the delta 

 when men began to people it, until they are accurately investigated. 



As to the ethnological relations of the Egyptian race, I think all 

 that can be said is, that neither the physical nor the philological evi- 

 dence, as it stands, is very satisfactory. That the Egyptians are not 

 negroes is certain, and that they are totally different from any typical 

 Semites is also certain. I am not aware that there are any people who 

 resemble them in character of hair and complexion, except the Dravid- 

 ian tribes of Central India, and the Australians ; and I have long- 

 been inclined to think, on purely physical grounds, that the latter are 

 the lowest and the Egyptians the highest members of a race of man- 

 kind of great antiquity, distinct alike from Aryan and Turanian on 

 the one side, and from negro and negrito on the other. And it seems 

 to me that the philologists, with their "Cushites" and "Hamites," are 

 tending toward a similar differentiation of the Egyptian stock from 

 its neighbors. But, both on the anthropological and on the philologi- 

 cal sides, the satisfactorily ascertained facts are few and the difficulties 

 multitudinous. 



I have addressed you to-night in my private capacity of a student 

 of nature, believing, as I hope with justice, that the discussion of ques- 

 tions which have long attracted me would interest you. But I have 

 not forgotten, and I dare say you have not, that I have the honor to 

 stand in a very close official relation to Eton as a member of the Gov- 

 erning Body. And I have reason to think that, in some quarters, I 

 am regarded as a dangerous member of that body, who, if he were 

 not restrained by his colleagues, would endeavor to abolish the tradi- 

 tional studies of the school, and set the sixth form working at the 

 generation of gases and the dissection of crawfishes, to the exclusion 

 of your time-honored discipline in Greek and Latin. 



To put the matter very gently, that statement is unhistorical ; and 

 I selected my topic for the discourse which I have just concluded, in 

 order that I might show you, by an example, the outside limits to 

 which my scientific fanaticism would carry me, if it had full swing. 

 Before the fall of the second empire, the French liberals raised a cry 

 for " Liberty as in Austria." I ask for " Scientific Education as in Hali- 

 carnassus," and that the culture given at Eton shall be, at any rate, 

 no narrower than that of a Greek gentleman of the age of Pericles. 



Herodotus was not a man of science, in the ordinary sense of the 

 word ; but he was familiar with the general results obtained by the 

 "physiologists" of his day, and was competent to apply his knowledge 



