THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION AT TORONTO. 37 



the most part unavailing, and created intense bitterness wherever 

 they have been made. 



The question of the origin and ethnography of the Papuans pre- 

 sents almost insuperable difficulties, and has not yet been satisfac- 

 torily solved, although it seems probable that the numerous tribes, 

 notwithstanding their striking physical divergencies, are merely 

 varieties of a general type and offshoots of a common stock. Whether 

 they form an isolated and independent branch of the human family, 

 or are akin to the dolichocephalous, dark-skinned, crisp-haired races 

 of Africa and the islands of the Pacific Ocean, as Huxley suggests, 

 is undetermined and perhaps indeterminable. 



THE BKITISH ASSOCIATION AT TORONTO. 



By Prof. DANIEL S. MARTIN. 



THE meeting of the British Association for the Advancement 

 of Science, held in Toronto in August last, was an occasion of 

 peculiar interest in many ways. The first visit of the association to 

 America, thirteen years ago the Montreal meeting of 1884 

 proved so successful and interesting that the invitation from Toronto, 

 urgently pressed upon the body two years since, found a ready re- 

 sponse, and has resulted in this important gathering. Our own asso- 

 ciation, meeting in Detroit during the previous week, had arranged 

 the time and the place with reference to the other; and a large 

 proportion of the American members, including most of those 

 prominent in our association, came to Toronto and took a more or 

 less active part. 



The American members, indeed, were no strangers to Toronto, 

 their experience when meeting in that city in 1889 having left a 

 profound impression of the culture and the hospitality of that beau- 

 tiful university town; so that all who had been there then were 

 glad to revisit the place and renew their pleasing associations. 

 Hence it came to pass that the recent meeting assumed an almost 

 international character. Of the more than thirteen hundred people 

 who attended, it is estimated that in a general way about one third 

 were British members, one third Canadians, and one third from 

 * the States." 



Such meetings as this are good in every way. They bring to- 

 gether in bonds of common interest people widely separated by resi- 

 dence, by nationality, and by feeling; and they can not fail to help 

 in the great object which all lovers of science and of humanity are 



