GEOGRAPHY AND ANTIQUITIES. 335 



Mr. Plant thought the specimen he exhibited belonged to the 

 time when the East of England was in the occupation of the early 

 palaeolithic people of Europe. 



MR. EVANS ON ANTHROPOLOGY. 



The following address was delivered at the meeting of the 

 British Association, in the department devoted to ethnology and 

 anthropology : 



After showing that the wide area of the sciences is not like that 

 of our inhabited world, broken up by various natural boundaries 

 into numerous kingdoms or empires, each speaking its own tongue, 

 and striving to maintain its independence of its neighbors, even 

 when not directly antagonistic to them ; but rather resembles 

 that of some great globe without any such geographical divisions, 

 occupied, it is true, by various races, each having a distinct cen- 

 tre, where its own peculiar language is spoken with the utmost 

 purity, but around those centres gradually intermingling with 

 the other surrounding races, so that in the border land between 

 any two such points it is often difficult, not to say impossible, 

 to say to which of the two races the inhabitants belong, or to 

 assign any fixed limit to their respective provinces ; he said : 



"The main, central point the history of the origin and 

 progress of the human race must, however, be that around 

 which all our thoughts must revolve, and towards which all our 

 investigations must be directed. He thought that any one who 

 will contrast our present amount of knowledge limited though 

 it be of the history of man, with what was known concern- 

 ing him even so lately as 20 years ago, will see how much has 

 been accomplished during that period, as compared with the 

 hundred-fold greater period which has elapsed since the days 

 of the old Greek philosophers, the results of whose inquiries 

 sufficed for the curiosity of so many subsequent generations. 

 For though in earlier days there were some, at all events, who 

 were not content with the prevailing views as to the origin and 

 antiquity of man, and as to the course of human civilization, 

 yet they were unable effectually to influence the current of 

 opinion ; and their speculations, when occasionally they are now, 

 as it were, disinterred from their writings, seem like some 

 recent organisms accidentally imbedded in one of the older rocks, 

 or at all events to present what some geologists have been 

 pleased to term ' prophetic types.' We have now, I think, 

 arrived at a point when it is almost unanimously admitted by 

 all candid inquirers who from the extent of their studies are com- 

 petent to form an opinion on the subject, that the family of man 

 dates back to an epoch far, far more remote than the CO centuries 

 or so allowed by Bishop Ussher's chronology ; that the univer- 

 sality of the Noachic deluge can no longer be maintained ; and 

 that there has been a progress more or less interrupted, it is 

 true, in different places and at different periods in the arts and 

 appliances of human industry, from the first appearance of man 



