424 TROPICAL NATURE 



to distinct and higher agencies than such as have affected 

 their development. 



Antiquity of Intellectual Man 



There is yet another line of inquiry bearing upon this 

 subject to which I wish to call your attention. It is a some- 

 what curious fact that, while all modern writers admit the 

 great antiquity of man, most of them maintain the very 

 recent development of his intellect, and will hardly con- 

 template the possibility of men equal in mental capacity to 

 ourselves having existed in prehistoric times. This question 

 is generally assumed to be settled by such relics as have been 

 preserved of the manufactures of the older races, showing 

 a lower and lower state of the arts ; by the successive 

 disappearance in early times of iron, bronze, and pottery; 

 and by the ruder forms of the older flint implements. The 

 weakness of this argument has been well shown by Mr. 

 Albert Mott in his very original but little-known presidential 

 address to the Literary and Philosophical Society of Liver- 

 pool in 1873. He maintains that " our most distant glimpses 

 of the past are still of a world peopled as now with men both 

 civilised and savage," and " that we have often entirely mis- 

 read the past by supposing that the outward signs of civilisa- 

 tion must always be the same, and must be such as are found 

 among ourselves." In support of this view he adduces a 

 variety of striking facts and ingenious arguments, a few of 

 which I will briefly summarise. 



Sculptures on Easter Island 



On one of the most remote islands of the Pacific Easter 

 island 2000 miles from South America, 2000 from the 

 Marquesas, and more than 1000 from the Gambier islands, 

 are found hundreds of gigantic stone images, now mostly in 

 ruins. They are often forty feet high, while some seem to 

 have been much larger, the crowns on their heads, cut out of 

 a red stone, being sometimes ten feet in diameter, while even 

 the head and neck of one is said to have been twenty feet 

 high. 1 These images once all stood erect on extensive stone 

 platforms. 



1 Journ. of Roy. Geog. Soc., 1870, pp. 177, 178. 



