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evidence in anthropology is necessarily travels. Doubtless the 
study alone of the materials collected from afar is of the greatest 
possible use. But we repeat, concerning the study of mankind, 
what we said about the study of animals; the anthropologist 
must leave his library and go into the great continents, in order 
to study by means of his own eye-sight. That it must be com- 
plete we have endeavoured to show ; but the only condition for 
its being complete is its being direct. . . . We can study 
philology and craniology in the library and in solitude, assisted by 
proper documents and sufficient materials—but not anthropology. 
We must not seek for a pure population in the streets of 
large cities. We can only study, in these places, individuals, not 
species. In those parts alone which we must make centres of 
observation, can we see man indefinitely multiplied among really 
primitive people still free from inter-mixture, or with the least 
possible taint of the same. Then we must hasten to seize his 
general characteristics, and take both his physical and moral 
portraits.” 
In the last Presidential Address the opinion was quoted that 
the Australian aborigines were not an example of a degenerate 
race. Prof. Baldwin Spencer and Mr. Gillen endorse this opinion 
in their introduction, and no other observers can write with more 
authority or express an opinion carrying more weight. They 
say: ‘It is sometimes asserted that the Australian native is 
degenerate, but it is difficult to see on what grounds this con- 
clusion is based. His customs and organization, as well as his 
various weapons and implements, show, as far as we can see, no- 
indication of any such feature. . . And there is at all events 
no evidence of the former existence of any stage of civilization 
higher than the one in which we now find them.” Andrew Lang, 
referring to the Australians, writes:—‘“ The natives are a race 
without a history, far more antique than Egypt, nearer the begin- 
ning than any other people. . . The soil holds no pottery, the 
cave walls no pictures drawn by men more advanced; the sea 
hides no ruined palaces, no cities are buried in the plains; there 
is not a trace of inscriptions nor of agriculture. The burying 
places contain relics of men perhaps even lower than the existing 
tribes, nothing attests the presence in any age of men more 
cultivated.” Apparently the Australian natives. represent one of 
those primitive types of mankind that were evolved at an early 
period after the parting of the two great branches of the tree of 
biology pertaining to the simian and human developments. And 
the analogy of tree growth may be carried further in the tendency 
which the larger branches have of producing buds, which may 
become developed into shoots and twigs of various lengths and 
strengths. The growth of these offshoots would depend upom 
