WELLINGTON PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY. 



First Meeting: 17tli June, 1S91. 

 E. Tregear, President, in the Cliair. 



NciD Member. — H. Farquhar. 



A copy of Vol. XXIII. of Transactions of the New Zealand 

 Institute was laid on the table ; also proof-sheets of Mr. Hud- 

 son's work on the entomology of New Zealand, with plates. 

 The latter were greatly admired. 



1. Address by the President. 



Abstract, 



Mr. Tregear comraenced by congratulating Sir James Hector on re- 

 ceiving the founder's medal of the Eoyal Geographical Society. He then 

 referred to the recent reported discovery of the bones of the Dinornis in 

 Queensland, and remarked that soundings recently taken showed solid 

 land once to have existed from New Zealand to Australia, and through the 

 Malay Archipelago to Asia. Whether the moa had been evolved from the 

 emu by gradual transformation, or the emu from the moa, would be for 

 the geologists and naturalists to discuss. The President then referred to 

 the theories as to man's origin, whether from a single pair or from many 

 sources ; described the primitive state of the human race, with tlie pro- 

 gress upward from the cave-dwellers to the pastoral peoples, then to 

 cultivators of the soil, then to dwellers in cities. Eeferring to the ques- 

 tion of marriage, he described the emergence of the communal form 

 into the slave period, and thus to the belief in the wife being the private 

 property of the husband. He then called attention to the agreement 

 between anthropology and the other sciences as to the great lapse of 

 time necessary for mankind to have existed and to have passed through 

 the palasolithic and neolithic periods to the building of great cities, which 

 we now know to have been in existence six thousand years ago. Great 

 portions of Asia and Africa, fertile, and abounding in all descriptions of 

 animal and vegetable life, were still unsettled. Many extracts from the 

 reports of travellers just returned from these wilds were quoted to show the 

 adaptability of those places to the uses of the emigrant. The President, 

 however, did not believe that the colonisation of Africa and other places 

 in the possession of native races was as practicable as was generally 

 believed. The enormous fecundity of the dark races, if relieved of the 

 checks caused by bloodshed and war, would inevitably squeeze out the 

 incomers, and prevent men of high organization existing in force suf- 

 ficient to control the lower and more persistent racial types. Mr. Tregear 

 concluded by expressing his opinion that the future of the world was not 

 so entirely in the hands of intellectual nations as he had once thought ; 

 but, if the advance of mankind was threatened by the overflow of 

 barbaric peoples, he trusted that the time of submersion would bo short, 

 and the world soon resume its path of progress, refreshed and invigorated 

 •with new and stronger life. 



