5oo POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



THE APPLICATION OF ZOOLOGICAL LAWS TO MAN 1 



By Pbofbssok WILLIAM RIDGEWAY, M.A., F.B.A., Lit.D., LL.D. 



THIKTY years ago in this very city I heard for the first time a 

 presidential address at the British Association, and I was singu- 

 larly fortunate in entering on my novitiate. I had the privilege of 

 hearing Professor Huxley deliver his presidential address to the 

 embryo of that section over which I, a very unworthy successor, have 

 this day the honor to preside. On that occasion Huxley dealt almost 

 exclusively with the physical evolution of man, and the Neanderthal 

 skull played an important part in his discourse. The anthropologists 

 of that day and since have severely criticized, and rightly so, the old 

 teleological doctrine that everything except man himself had been 

 created for man's use, and they emphatically enunciated the doctrine 

 that man himself has been evolved under the same laws as every other 

 animal. Yet the anthropologists themselves have not always carried 

 out in practise their own principles to their logical conclusions. To- 

 day I shall attempt to show that the chief errors which impede the 

 scientific study of man, which lead to the maladministration of alien 

 races, and which beget blunders of the gravest issue in our own social 

 legislation, are due in the main to man's pride in shutting his eyes to 

 the fact that he is controlled by the same laws as the rest of the animal 

 kingdom. 



I. Let us first consider some of the chief problems which at present 

 are being debated by the physical anthropologists. Foremost in im- 

 portance of these is the stratification of populations in Europe. It has 

 generally been held as an article of faith that Europe was first peopled 

 by a non-Aryan race. Of course it is impossible for us to say what 

 were the physical characteristics of paleolithic man, but when we come 

 to neolithic man the problem becomes less hopeless. It has been gen- 

 erally held that the first neolithic men in Europe, whether they were 

 descended or not from their paleolithic predecessors, had long skulls, 

 but were not Aryan; that later on a migration of short-skulled people 

 from Asia passed along central Europe and into France, becoming 

 what is commonly termed the Alpine, by some the Ligurian, by others 

 the Celtic race; that later these two primitive non-Aryan races were 

 overrun by the Aryans, who, when these theories were first started, 

 were universally considered to have come from the Hindu Kush, but 



1 Address of the president of the Anthropological Section of the British 

 Association for the Advancement of Science, Dublin, 1908. 



