THE STUDY OF MAN. 305 



sphere, I can only select a few which seem at present to demand 

 special consideration. The annual growth of our knowledge is 

 chiefly in matters of detail which are dull to chronicle, and the 

 past year has not been fertile in discoveries bearing on those 

 great questions which are of popular interest. 



On the subject of the antiquity of man there are no fresh 

 discoveries of serious importance to record. My esteemed prede- 

 cessor at the Leeds meeting two years ago, after reviewing the 

 evidence as to the earliest traces of humanity, concluded his 

 survey with the judgment, " On the whole, therefore, it appears 

 to me that the present verdict as to Tertiary man must be in the 

 form of 'Not proven/" Subsequent research has not contrib- 

 uted any new facts which lead us to modify that finding. The 

 most remarkable of the recent discoveries under this head is that 

 of the rude implements of the Kentish chalk-plateau described by 

 Prof. Prestwich ; but while these are evidently of archaic types, 

 it must be admitted that there is even yet room for difference of 

 opinion as to their exact geological age. 



Neither has the past year's record shed new light on the dark- 

 ness which enshrouds the origin of man. What the future may 

 have in store for us in the way of discovery we can not forecast ; 

 at present we have nothing but hypothesis, and we must still 

 wait for further knowledge with the calmness of philosophic ex- 

 pectancy. 



I may, however, in this connection refer to the singularly in- 

 teresting observations of Dr. Louis Robinson on the prehensile 

 power of the hands of children at birth, and to the graphic 

 pictures with which he has illustrated his paper. Dr. Robinson 

 has drawn, from the study of the one end of life, the same conclu- 

 sion which Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson deduced from the study 

 of his grandfather, that there still survive in the human structure 

 and habit traces of our probably arboreal ancestry. 



Turning from these unsolved riddles of the past to the survey 

 of mankind as it appears to us in the present, we are confronted 

 in that wide range of outlook with many problems well-nigh as 

 difficult and obscure. 



Mankind, whenever and however it may have originated, ap- 

 pears to us at present as an assemblage of tribes, each not neces- 

 sarily homogeneous, as their component elements may be derived 

 from diverse genealogical lines of descent. It is much to be re- 

 gretted that there is not in our literature a more definite nomen- 

 clature for these divisions of mankind, and that such words as 

 race, people, nationality, tribe, and type are often used indiscrimi- 

 nately as though they were synonyms. 



In the great mass of knowledge with which we deal there are 

 several collateral series of facts, the terminologies of which should 



VOL. XLII. 20 



