SESSION 1899=1900. 



WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 11th, 1899. 



INAUGURAL ADDRESS 



BY 



Prof. G. S. BOULGER, F.L.S., F.G.S. 



'* Mm\ JFirst Cnntact lnitb Hatur^/' 



IT was not in the inhospitable barren northern lands that we 

 should look for the cradle of the human race, but in a zone 

 more luxuriant in variation, " the home of our collaterals, the 

 tailless apes." There were a good many problems that arose 

 over these beginnings of the human race. 



Did primeval man, for instance, pass through a rudi- 

 mentary stage of culture in which wooden implements alone were 

 used, implements of which, from their perishable nature, no 

 trace is likely to remain ? Such a stage seems almost to be 

 preserved to us in the existing condition of the Ainu of Northern 

 -Japan, — a persistent anthropological type, as it were, — the best 

 descriptioii of whom we owe to that intrepid traveller, Mr. 

 Savage Landor. 



The Ainu cannot make pottery, and have no metallurgy. 

 They use large shells as drinking vessels, and formerly used 

 them also for shaving. They use needles of fish-bones, nets of 

 twisted vine-stems, dug-out canoes with wooden anchors, bows 

 each of one piece of yew, 50 inches long, with bamboo or bone- 

 tipped arrows, and war-clubs only occasionally inlaid with stone. 

 They care more for ornament than for clothing, tattooing them- 

 selves with cuttle-sepia or smoke-black, and wearing large metal 

 ear-rings and glass necklaces, received in barter from the 

 Japanese, Coreans, or Chinese, though they do not distinguish 



