Oct. 20, 1887J 



NA TV RE 



597 



white man, who, on his side, looks upon these "Bugres" with 

 feelings of intense horror and dread. Until these wild Indians 

 shall at least have been partially civilized, the valley of the Rio 

 Doce must necessarily remain a sealed paradise. The few 

 attempts made hitherto in this direction have hopelessly failed, 

 perhaps because of the gross mismanagement on the part of 

 those to whom the task was intrusted. The author's arduous 

 explorations have resulted in a carefully plotted map of the Rio 

 Doce and of its tributaries, based upon over 4000 magnetic 

 bearings and careful dead reckonings. 



On some Dejects in the Ordnance Sufvey, by Mr. H. S. 

 Wilkinson. — The author gave a brief sketch of the various 

 methods used by cartographers in the delineation of the 

 irregularities of the ground, illustrating the several styles 

 by specimen sheets of foreign topographical surveys, and he 

 explained that while the English i-inch hdl-shaded Ordnance 

 map is for the mountainous dislricts unsurpassed by anything 

 published in the world, the same map utterly fails in the repre- 

 sentation of the less elevated and therefore less sloping ground. 

 Mr. Wilkinson complained that the contours given on both the 

 6-inch and the i-inch map are not sufficiently numerous and 

 strongly-drawn to be of practical value. He suggested that the 

 Ordnance Survey might produce a physical map of Great 

 Britain on some such scale as i : 500,000 or i : 300,000, so as 

 to relieve English students from the necessity of buying their 

 maps abroad. In conclusion, Mr. Wilkinson urged that the 

 Ordnance Survey should form a high ideal of the scope of its 

 work, and should aim at assisting the eye and imagination of the 

 student to realize " the nature of the earth's surface as the arena 

 of the development of mankind." 



Sir Charles Wilson said that the reader of the paper appeared 

 to be under some misconception with regard to the nature and 

 character of the Ordnance Survey. It differed in some respects 

 from those of foreign countries, which were made for purely 

 military purposes. It was true that our Ordnance Survey 

 in its conception was military in character, but its military 

 character was soon lost, and it was now a cadastral sur- 

 vey. The reader of the paper had complained of the 

 crowded detail on the Ordnance maps, but it was to be 

 ■^borne in mind that England was much more crowded than any 

 foreign country. He was acquainted with most of the gentlemen 

 who superintended the foreign surveys, and he knew that our 

 I-inch map was looked upon as one of the most beautiful pieces 

 of work that had been published. With regard to contours, he 

 said they were tied down by Parliament, but he would like to 

 say that the contours on the Ordnance Survey were instrumental 

 contours, and all strictly accurate. The Ordnance Survey maps 

 indeed were acknowledged to be the most mathematically 

 accurate maps in Europe. 



A paper on The Ulilization of the Ordnance Survey was read 

 by Sir Charles Wilson, who showed a number of Ordnance maps 

 on various scales. He contended that in England as in Ireland 

 the unit of area should be the same for all local purposes. The 

 Ordnance maps had not been much used so far for educational 

 purposes, though they were admirably adapted therefor. He 

 suggested that in the elementary schools a commencement 

 should be made with the immediate neighbourhood around 

 them, which could be done with the 25-inch map. That 

 showed roads, ditches, houses, and isolated trees, and conveyed 

 to the child an idea of how objects were represented in plan. 

 From the place with which they were familiar an advance might 

 be made to the county, then to the whole country, the Continent, 

 and so on. This plan was already in use in France, and he 

 would like to see elementary schools supplied with maps such as 

 he had suggested. 



Dr. H. R. Mill gave some account of a new bathy-orographical 

 map of the Clyde basin, embodying the results of the researches 

 which he and others have been carrying on for some time. He 

 described the peculiarities of some of the lochs on the west coast 

 of Scotland, and pointing out the Wyville Thomson ridge, off 

 the north-west cjast of Scotland, stated that it was owing to this 

 ridge that the Arctic waters did not descend to our shores, and 

 give us a semi-Arctic climate. 



A Plea for the Metre, by E. G. Ravenstein. — The author 

 pointed out the great advantages of the metre as a universal 

 international standard of length. There were at present in use 

 three international measures of length, viz. the English foot, in 

 countries covering 18,188,112 square miles, with 471,000,000 

 inhabitants, [the metre (12,671,200 square miles, 347,091,000 

 inhabita ts), and the Castilian foot (752,901 square miles, 



5,905,000 inhabitants). The English foot, at present in use 

 throughout the British and Russian Empires, in the United 

 States, and in some other countries, appeared to gain no new 

 adherents, while the metre was still engaged upon a career of 

 conquest. Denmark and Russia were the only countries in 

 Europe which had not as yet adopted it. The metrical system 

 appeared to him to present great advantages to business men, 

 and in 1885 nearly one-half the commercial transactions of the 

 country were carried on with countries using the metre. The 

 time at present expended in our schools upon acquiring a know- 

 ledge of an absurdly complicated system of weights and measures 

 might be devoted to more useful objects. To geographers and 

 statisticians the universal acceptance of the metre would prove 

 an immense boon. Scientific men in other departments had 

 freely adopted the metre, and geographers should follow this 

 laudable example. Owing, however, to the intimate connexion 

 of geography with the common affairs of life, he despaired of the 

 general acceptance of the metre until it should have become the 

 legal standard of length. 



Section H — Anthropology. 



The Primitive Seat of the Aryans, by Canon Isaac Taylor. — The 

 author discussed recent theories as to the region in which the Aryan 

 race originated. The pre-scientific Japhetian theory and the Cau- 

 casian theory of Blumenbach have long been abandoned. A few 

 years ago the theory advocated by Pott, Lassen, and Max Miiller, 

 which made the highlands of Central Asia the cradle of the 

 Aryans, was received with general acquiesence, the only protest 

 of note coming from Dr. Latham, who urged that the Asiatic 

 hypothesis was mere assumption based on no shadow of proof. 

 The recent investigations of Geiger, Cuno, Penka, and Schrader 

 have brought about an increasing conviction that the origin of 

 the Aryan race m ust be sought not in Central Asia, but in 

 Northern Europe. These writers have urged that the evidence 

 of language shows that the primitive Aryans must have inhabited 

 a forest-clad country in the n eighbourhood of the sea, covered 

 during a prolonged winter with snow, the vegetation consisting 

 largely of the fir, the birch, the beech, the oak, the elm, the 

 willow, and the hazel ; while the fauna comprised the beaver, 

 the wolf, the fox, the hare, the deer, the eel, and the salmon — 

 conditions which restrict us to a region north of the Alps and 

 west of a line drawn from Dantzic to the Black Sea. 



It has also been urged that the primitive Aryan type was that 

 of the Scandinavian and North German peoples — dolichocepha- 

 lic, tall, with white skin, fair hair, and blue eyes — and that 

 those darker and shorter races of Eastern and Southern Europe 

 who speak Aryan languages are mainly of Iberian or Turanian 

 blood, having acquired their Aryan speech from Aryan con- 

 querors. It has been urged that the tendency in historic times 

 has been to migration from north to south, and that in Central 

 Asia we find no vestiges of any people of the pure Aryan type, 

 while the primitive Aryan vocabulary points to the fauna and 

 flora of Northern Europe rather than to that of Central Asia. 



But the Aryans must have had forefathers from whom they 

 were developed ; and the inquiry suggests itself. What could have 

 been the race from which the Aryans might have been evolved? 

 A Semitic, an Iberian, an Egyptian, a Chinese, a Turkic, or a 

 Mongolian parentage is out of the question ; and the author pro- 

 posed to show that both from the anthropological and the linguistic 

 point of view the Finnic people come closest to the Aryans, and 

 are the only existing family of mankind from which the Aryans 

 could have been evolved. The Tchudic branch of the Finnic 

 family approaches very nearly to what we must assume to have- 

 been the primitive Aryan type. 



The only argument for deriving the proto-Aryan from Central 

 Asia was the belief that Sanskrit comes the nearest to the primi- 

 tive Aryan speech. It is now believed that the Lithuanian, a 

 Baltic language, represents a more primitive form of Aryan, 

 speech than Sanskrit, and hence the argument formerly adduced 

 in support of the hypothesis that the Aryans originated in Central 

 Asia becomes an argument in favour of Northern Europe. 



If this hypothesis as to the primitive identity of the Aryan 

 and Finnic races be established, a world of light is thrown upon 

 many difficulties as to the primitive significances of many Aryan 

 roots, and the nature of the primitive Aryan grammar. We are 

 furnished, in fact, with a new and powerful instrument of philo- 

 logical investigation, which can hardly fail to yield important 

 results. Comparative philology must henceforward take account 

 of the Finnic languages as affording the oldest materials which 

 are available for comparisoD. 



