President's Address — Sect. F, 351 



But at this ep»^)cli tlio dawn <^»f modern science was ali-eady break 

 ing, heralded by tlie Hght that had been slied by Marco Polo, Da Gania 

 anci Columbus on the dark, confused theories oi Ptolemy and Edrisi. 

 And just as these media-val authorities had to yield to the above 

 named explorers in the realm of geography, so Ptolemy had to yield 

 to Copernicus and Calileo, and so Aristotle, Galen and Avicenna had 

 to yield to Bacon and Von Helmont. The half-century before the 

 arrival of the Dronipdnris in Table Bay witnessed great strides in the 

 natural sciences. Human anatomy and physiology had been revolu- 

 tionised by Vesalius and Harvey, the latter of whom survived five 

 years the Cape settlement. Somewhat later, it is true, Ray and 

 Willughby laid the foundations of plant and animal physiology; 

 Malpighi, Swammerdam and Leeuwenhfjek those of comparative his- 

 tology and anatomy ; but of these five contemporaries the two last had 

 heard, probably when young, of their countryman's recent exploit. 



Towaids the end of the sixteenth century Gesner and Akhovandus 

 had revived on an inductive basis the Historia Auimalium by studying 

 the forms and habits of living animals witliout being content with the 

 descriptions of Ai-istotle and Pliny, but not for almost two hundred 

 years were these zoological studies extended to the human race, when 

 the sciences of ethnology and anthropology were established by Des 

 Brosses (Le Culte des Dieux fetiches, 1760), Blumenthal, Cuvier, 

 Retzius and Pritchard, and aiivertised by the speculations <jf Lord 

 Monboddo. Meanwhile it is at the hand of physicians and surgeons 

 that we are naturally prepared to look for the accouchment of these 

 younger natural sciences. 



To the old sea-surgeon Van Riebeck, therefore, we turn, to find 

 him applving the comparative metliod in likening the yellow, slit-eyed 

 Bushmen to the inhabitants of north China. To him and to the 

 !surgeon Pieter van Meerhof we owe some of our earliest information of 

 the Bushmen or Strandloopers, of the Saldanha Bay Hottentots and 

 our first acquaintance with the Namaqua, the Grigriqua, Cochoqua and 

 Chorachouqua tribes. 



With Meerhof's must be associated the name of George Frederick 

 Wreede of Brunswick, the first of a long list of German authorities on 

 South African anthropology and ]-)hilology. He compiled in 1603 a 

 Dutch-Hottentot vocabulary in Greek characters, a work unfortunately 

 since lost to science, though perhaps portions exist in Leibnitz's Collec- 

 tanea Etymologica (1679) and in the appendix to Junker's Life oj 

 Jobst Ludolf (1710). Probably to Wreede's knowledge of the subject 

 Nicolas Witzen, burgomaster of Amsterdam, owes a statement in a 

 letter addressed to Ludolf that the Hottentots worship a cert<iin god 

 whose head is the size of his fist {se adorare detim certum aliquem 

 cnjiis caput inawis sen puyiii maijtiitadiiieni haberet). This recalls the 

 frequent representations in Bushman drawings of a human figure with 

 a diminutive head, generally supposed to be of a man disguised for one 

 of the animal dances indulged in" by these people. 



To Captain Hieronymus Cruse (1663-68) we owe our earliest 

 account of the Hessequa, Attaqua and Outeniqua tribes, residing in 



