xlviii LIFE OF DR. ROLLE8TON. 



capacity, as seen at the sub-section of Anthropology at Bristol 

 in 1875: 'he had contrived to gather round his presidential 

 chair some of the leading men in literary as well as in physical 

 science, and those who had the good fortune to be present will 

 not easily forget the intellectual tournament, which from day to 

 day filled the room to the very doorwa} r s and riveted the in- 

 terest of "the audience, and in which he held the scales and 

 adjusted the palm with the skill and authority of an acknow- 

 ledged master . . . Among the many fields in which Professor 

 Rolleston will be sorely missed, the arena of the British Asso- 

 ciation will not be the least/ His Address at this meeting 

 (p. 880) took up several anthropological topics of wide interest. 

 Bagehot had remarked, and Darwin quoted his remark, that 

 1 savages did not formerly waste away before the classical nations 

 as they do now before modern civilised nations ; had they done 

 so the old moralists would have mused over the event ; but 

 there is no lament in any writer of the period over the perishing 

 barbarians.' Rolleston had been struck at the first reading with 

 the beauty and originality of this passage, but on second 

 thoughts he asked himself whether it was safe to argue that 

 there were no perishing barbarians from the silence of the 

 classical writers about them, any more than it would be safe to 

 say that Stonehenge was not standing because the Romans did 

 not mention it. The conclusion of this address shows how 

 thoroughly the speaker took the study of Anthropology to be 

 the study of Human Progress, and how the pessimistic doctrine 

 that the world is going more and more to the bad, a theory just 

 then beginning to hold up its head anew in Europe, seemed to 

 him irreconcileable with the facts. A good example of his fresh 

 way of dealing even with well-worn topics is to be found in his 

 paper on the Iron, Bronze, and Stone Ages (p. 660). One would 

 hardly have expected to find such a subject treated with new 

 lights in the Transactions of a local Archaeological Society, but 

 it is plain that the writer having undertaken to read a paper, as 

 his manner was, put his whole force into it. No one had shown 

 so clearly that the effect on civilisation ordinarily attributed to 



