1868. | Geography and Ethnology. 537 
the third stage, such as that of a Norfolk farmer, he must pass 
through the condition of a herder of goats and kine. The three 
grand stages are illustrated by a prairie Indian, a Bedouin Arab, 
and a Norfolk farmer. A hunter is a wild man; a herdsman is a 
tame man; and a husbandman is a social man. The experience 
gained among the Kirghees of Central Asia by M. Vambery, the 
famous Hungarian traveller, enabled that gentleman to speak in 
support of Mr. Dixon’s views; and the Bishop of Labuan, with 
twenty years’ experience in Borneo, considered himself justified in 
supporting those views. ‘The Bishop had found in Borneo the 
hnnting savage, the herding savage, and the farming savage. He 
said the farming savage was so debased that he would only be 
raised to the scale of a Norfolk farmer in three or four generations. 
In a paper “On the Inhabitants of Cyrenaica and Western 
Libya,” Captain Lindesay Brine, R.N., mentioned some interesting 
facts which he had learned in the spring of the present year while 
examining the African coast between Berenice on the west, and 
Egypt on the east. “The Rivers and Territories of the Rio de la 
Plata” formed the subject of the following paper, the author of 
which was Mr. T. J. Hutchinson, consul at Rosario. Mr. Hutchin- 
son’s remarks referred to the physical geography of La Plata, to 
the prospects of the Centro-Argentine Railway Company, the seat 
of war in Paraguay, and to the sources of the Paraguay and the 
Amazon in the diamond mine territory of Matto Grosso in Brazil. 
The last paper read on Friday was by Mr. A. Waddington, a 
North American colonist, who most enthusiastically advocated the 
construction of an overland railway route through British territory, 
from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Ottawa to the head of Bute 
Inlet, opposite Vancouver’s Island. He carefully described the 
character of the whole route in exploring and surveying which he 
had spent many years and sunk a large fortune. The length of 
the railway would be 2,885 miles, and the estimated total cost 
27,000,0002. Captain Richards said that we should soon have a 
railway carried across to British Columbia if it were only possible 
to shift Great Britain across the Atlantic to the entrance of the 
river St. Lawrence. Notwithstanding the fact that people in this 
country could scarcely be expected to take the same amount of 
interest in the project as Mr. Waddington took in it, he (Captain 
Richards) believed that sooner or later it would be carried out. 
(It may be mentioned that Mr. Waddington has also had this 
subject before the Royal Geographical Society.) 
The proceedings on Monday opened with a paper “On Explora- 
tions in Greenland,” by Mr. Edward Whymper, a gentleman whose 
reputation as an adventurous and scientific traveller has rapidly 
reached the highest rank. This paper proved to be highly inter- 
