September 20 1900] 



NATURE 



513 



the total may have reached 8,000,000 acres, or nearly five 

 million acres more than the final figure in Sir Robert Giffen's 

 calculation. If anything like 20,000,000 acres have thus been 

 added to the wheat-growing surface of the globe in the last five 

 or six years, which these further figures suggest, even if no cor- 

 rection be made for the Indian quota, there may be much less 

 difference than was suggested in the memorandum between the 

 growth of population and wheat-growing. 



Without attempting in any way to controvert what was one of 

 the lessons of the memorandum I have been examining, as to 

 the tendency to increase the numbers of cattle at a ratio above 

 that of population, it has also to be remembered that the apparent 

 37 per cent, increase there shown between 1873 ^"^^ ^893 may 

 have to be discounted by subsequent deductions in the United 

 States, in Australasia, and at the Cape in recent years; while 

 it is one of the problems I have never yet seen satisfactorily 

 answered, why in almost all old countries except our own the 

 diminution of the stock of sheep seems continuous and remark- 

 able. 1 mention these matters only, however, to suggest the 

 amount of uncertainty which must attend the efforts to arrive at 

 conclusions, made even by the highest authorities, on the only 

 data which exist. If there is, as I have shown, such uncertainty 

 still in the facts on which a conclusion could be built as to the 

 past history of the relative growth of live stock, or of cereal 

 culture and the supply of bread-stuffs, how much greater must 

 the difficulty be of those who attempt, on the basis of such data, 

 to forecast the course of events for a generation yet to come ! I 

 confess I am not intrepid enough to follow some of the conjec- 

 tures which have been hazarded on this point, and can only, in 

 concluding this address, recur once more to the prime qvalifica- 

 tions for safe statistical deductions with which I opened my 

 remarks — redoubled caution in handling calculations, a very 

 guarded use of data giving records of single and isolated years, 

 and a wise reservation in any prophetic pictures of the future of 

 agricultural production, whether of wheat or cotton, in meat or 

 in wool, of the contingency, always present, of altered condi- 

 tions which ever and anon in the past have altered and falsified 

 the predictions of earlier observers. 



SECTION H. 



ANTHROPOLOGY. 



OPENING Address by Prof. John Rhys, M.A., LL.D., 

 President of the Section. 



Perhaps I ought to begin by apologising for my conspicuous 

 lack of qualification to fill this chair, but I prefer, with your 

 permission, to dismiss that as a subject far too large for me to 

 dispose of this morning. So I would beg to call your attention 

 back for a moment to the excellent address given to this Section 

 last year. It was full of practical suggestions which are well 

 worth recalling : one was as to the project of a Bureau of 

 Ethnology for Greater Britain, and the other turned on the de- 

 sirability of founding an Imperial Institution to represent our 

 vast Colonial Empire. I mention these in the hope that we 

 shall not leave the Government and others concerned any peace 

 till we have realised those modest dreams of enlightenment. 

 People's minds are just now so full of other things that the 

 interests of knowledge and science are in no little danger of 

 being overlooked. So it is all the more desirable that the 

 British Association, as our great parliament of science, should 

 take the necessary steps to prevent that happening, and to keep 

 steadily before the public the duties which a great and com- 

 posite nation like ours owes to the world and to humanity, 

 whether civilised or savage. 



The difficulties of the position of the president of this Section 

 arise in a great measure from the vastness of the field of research 

 which the Science of Man covers. He is, therefore, constrained 

 to limit his attention as a rule to some small corner of it ; and, 

 with the audacity of ignorance, I have selected that which 

 might be labelled the early ethnology of the British Isles, but I 

 propose to approach it only along the precarious paths of folk- 

 lore and philology, because I know no other. Here, however, 

 comes a personal difficulty : at any rate I suppose I ought to 

 pretend that I feel it a difficulty, namely, that I have committed 

 myself to publicity on that subject already. But, as a matter of 

 fact, I can hardly bring myself to confess to any such feeling ; 

 and this leads me to mention in passing the change of altitude 

 which I have lived to notice in the case of students in my own 

 position. Most of us here present have known men who, when 

 they had once printed their views on their favourite subjects of 



NO. 161 2, VOL. 62] 



study, stuck to those views through thick and thin, or at most 

 limited themselves to changing the place of a comma here and 

 there, or replacing an occasional and by a but. The work had 

 then been made perfect, and not a few great questions affecting 

 no inconsiderable portions of the universe had been for ever set 

 at rest. That was briefly the process of getting ready for pos- 

 terity, but one of its disadvantages was that those who adopted 

 it had to waste a good deal of time in the daily practice of the 

 art of fencing and winning verbal victories ; for, metaphorically 

 speaking, 



" With many a whack and many a bang 

 Rough crab-tree and old iron rang." 



Now all that, however amusing it may have been, has been 

 changed, and what now happens is somewhat as follows : AB 

 makes an experiment or propounds what he calls a working 

 hypothesis ; but no sooner has AB done so than CD, who is 

 engaged in the same sort of research, proceeds to improve on 

 AB. This, instead of impelling AB to rush after CD with all 

 kinds of epithets and insinuating that his character is deficient in 

 all the ordinary virtues of a man and a brother, only makes him 

 go to work again and see whether he cannot improve on CD's 

 results ; and most likely he succeeds, for one discovery leads to 

 another. So we have the spectacle not infrequently of a man 

 illustrating the truth of the poet's belief, 



" That men may rise on stepping-stones 

 Of their dead selves to higher things." 



It is a severe discipline in which all display of feeling is con- 

 sidered bad form. Of course every'now and then a spirit of the 

 ruder kmd discards the rules of the game and attracts attention 

 by having public fits of bad temper ; but generally speaking the 

 rivalry goes on quietly enough to the verge of monotony, with 

 the net result that the stock of knowledge is increased. I may 

 be told, however, that while this kind of exercise may be agree- 

 able to the ass who writes, it is not conducive to the safety of 

 the publisher's chickens. To that it might suffice to answer 

 that the publisher is usually one who is well able to take good 

 care of his chickens ; but, seriously, what it would probably 

 mean is, that in the matter of the more progressive branches of 

 study, smaller editions of the books dealing with them would 

 be required, but a more frequent issue of improved editions of 

 them or else new books altogether, a state of things to which 

 the publisher would probably find ways of adapting himself 

 without any loss of profits. And after all, the interests of 

 knowledge must be reckoned uppermost. It is needless to say 

 that I have in view only a class of books which literary men 

 proper do not admit to be literature at all ; and the book trade 

 has one of its mainstays, no doubt, in books of pure literature, 

 which are like the angels that neither marry nor give in marriage : 

 they go on for ever in their serene singleness of purpose to charm 

 and chasten the reader's mind. 



My predecessor last year alluded to an Oxford don .said to have 

 given it as his conviction that anthropology rests on a founda- 

 tion of romance. I have no notion who that Oxford don may 

 have been, but I am well aware that Oxford dons have some- 

 times a knack of using very striking language. In this case, 

 however, I should be inclined to share to a certain extent that 

 Oxford don's regard for romance, holding as I do that the facts 

 of history are not the only facts deserving of careful study by the 

 anthropologist. There are also the facts of fiction, and to some 

 of those I would now call your attention. Recently, in putting 

 together a volume on Welsh folklore, I had to try to classify 

 and analyse in my mind the stories which have been current in 

 Wales about the fairies. Now the mass of folklore about the 

 fairies is of various origins. Thus with them have been more or 

 less inseparably confounded certain divinities or demons, es- 

 pecially various kinds of beings associated with the rivers and 

 lakes of the country. They are creations introduced from the 

 workshop of the imagination ; then there is the dead ancestor, 

 who also seems to have contributed his share to the sum total of 

 our notions about the Little People. In far the greater number 

 of cases, however, we seem to have something historical, or, at 

 any rate, something which may be contemplated as historical. 

 The key to the fairy idea is that there once was a real race of 

 people to whom all kinds of attributes, possible and impossible, 

 have been given in the course of uncounted centuries of story- 

 telling by races endowed with a lively imagination. 



When the mortal midwife has been fetched to attend on a 

 fairy mother in a fairy palace, she is handed an ointment which 

 she is to apply to the fairy baby's eyes, at the same time that she is 

 gravely warned not to touch her own eyes with it. Of course 



