President's Address. 127 



conditions under which races which have long existed die out are 

 obscure. But the fact is undoubted, and in the case particularly 

 of large animals it may well be rapid. Their numbers in a given 

 area are small. Their breeding places in a temperate and not very 

 mountainous region must be discoverable and accessible. The 

 more man in the hunting stage of society feels himself unequal to 

 cope with the adult animal, the more surely will he, either for food 

 or fear, direct his attacks upon the young. 



The method of reasoning from instruments successively of stone, 

 bronze and iron, and from the discoveries in kitchen rubbish heaps 

 in Denmark, and lake villages in Switzerland, is certainly sound. 

 But there is great danger of rash generalization leading to con- 

 clusions in which other ingredients than those of time are overlooked. 

 "We have distinct historical evidence in the sacred writings and in 

 Homer, belonging to the transition from the bronze to the iron 

 age, in the part of the world most advanced, and, from the Phoe- 

 nician communications extending from Greece to Egypt, likely to be 

 the most advancing. I say distinct historical evidence. For whoever 

 Homer may have been, and whether there be any truth in his 

 narrative or not, no man can doubt that he was a painter of actual 

 contemporary manners, whether more or less idealized ; and in the 

 arts of common life certainly an accurate painter. But though the 

 civilized world has long discarded cutting instruments except of 

 iron, we know not how long the earlier instruments may have 

 continued in use among rude tribes, even at no great distance from 

 those more advanced. The Bheels and Goonds (the latter retaining 

 the very peculiar form of cannabilism, described by Herodotus as 

 practised by wood tribes beyond the Indus) exist in our Indian 

 empire. Lake dwellings like those of Switzerland are described 

 by Herodotus as existing at no great distance, whether in actual 

 space or in physical geography, from civilized Greece. The accu- 

 mulations of deltas, gravel-beds, and the like are most important 

 evidences of date. But here again caution is requisite. A single 

 flood from the bursting of an ice-dam in the mountains not fifty 

 years ago, produced changes near Martigny which might well be 

 supposed to be the work of centuries. 



