PROFESSOR RIDGEWAY AND RACIAL 



ORIGINS 



By BERNARD HOUGHTON, B.A., F.R.A.I. 



Indian Civil Service 



As even the most jejune of amateur astronomers is aware, the 

 light on the moon in its monthly phases does not advance with 

 a measured and nice precision. At times, owing to the move- 

 ments known as librations, the advancing line of light halts 

 and actually recedes for a space. In like manner, although 

 the public has with justice come to regard the Presidential 

 Addresses at the British Association as so many milestones 

 in the march of Science into the unknown, there are occasions 

 when they deviate widely from the path established by known 

 facts, and end finally in some erratic retrogression. Of such 

 was the address read at the Dublin 1 meeting by Prof. Ridgeway 

 on the Application of Zoological Laws to Man. In this oration 

 the Professor, so justly renowned for his researches in the 

 archaeology and ethnology of the Latins and Greeks, has 

 attacked and to his own satisfaction vanquished problems of 

 such wide and commanding interest as the origin of the Aryans, 

 the application of European politics and institutions to coloured 

 races, and the tendency of our present social laws to engender 

 an (assumed) deterioration of the English race. The deep 

 human interest, the grave importance, attaching to such topics 

 will not be gainsaid. And these pronouncements of the Pro- 

 fessor on them, delivered as they were under the aegis of a 

 scientific association, announced, so to speak, ex cathedra, must 

 sound in the ears of many with a tone of quite pontifical 

 authority. The Times has quoted and endorsed his conclusions, 

 utilising them, indeed, in the support of some characteristic 

 reactionary views. An attempt therefore to show that the 

 arguments used rest on foundations of quicksand, and that 

 the inferences do not really arise from the facts adduced, will 

 perhaps, even for the non-scientific, be neither altogether devoid 



of interest nor empty of instruction. 



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