886 ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY. 



ail Evans to interpret their weapons after their extinction. The 

 actual Homeric poems deal with a region thickly peopled and long 

 subdued by a Greek-speaking metal-using race. Rhodes and Crete 

 were as different then from what Fiji and New Guinea are now, as 

 Merion and Idomeneus are from Thakombau and Rauparahu. But, 

 thirdly, let us ask, as the philosophers did with regard to the fish 

 and its weight in and out of the bucket of water, Are the facts 

 about which we are to inquire really facts ? Now I am not going 

 to plunge into the excursuses appended to editions of Herodotus, 

 nor to discuss the history of the Minyae, or of any other race of 

 which we know as little. But I will just quote a few verses from a 

 beautiful passage in Job which appear to me to give as exact 

 a description of a barbarous race perishing and outcast, as could be 

 given now by a poetical observer in Australia or California. 

 Speaking of such a race the poet says : — 



' For want and famine they were solitary, fleeing into the wilder- 

 ness in former time desolate and waste. Who cut up mallows by 

 the bushes, and juniper roots for their meat. They were driven 

 forth from among men, (they cried after them as after a thief;) to 

 dwell in the cliffs of the valleys, in caves of the earth, and in 

 the rocks. Among the bushes they brayed ; under the nettles they 

 were gathered together. They were children of fools, yea, children 

 of base men : they were viler than the earth ' (Job, chap. xxx. 

 ver. 3-8). 



I opine that these unhappy savages must have 'wasted away' 

 under these conditions, and that there is no need, with such actual 

 verae causae at hand, to postulate the working of any ' mysterious' 

 agency, any inscrutable poisonous action 'of the breath of civilisa- 

 tion. What is mysterious to me is not civilisation, but the fact 

 that people who are in relation with it do not act up to its behests. 

 And what is the mystery to me is not how an epidemic can, 

 when introduced amongst helpless Polynesians, work havoc, but 

 how it is that epidemics should be allowed to do so here in England 

 from time to time. We are but some four years away from the 

 last small-pox epidemic, of the management, or rather mismanage- 

 ment, of which I had myself some little opportunity of taking 

 stock ; and what we saw then in England renders it a little super- 

 fluous to search for recondite causes to account for depopulation in 

 countries without Local Boards. You owe much in Bristol to 



