902 ADDRESS ON ANTHROPOLOGY. 



species ; and by the employment of the philosophy of continuity 

 and the doctrine of evolution, with which the world was not made 

 acquainted till more than ten years after Prichard's death, many a 

 weaker man than he has been enabled to bind into more readily 

 manageable burdens the vast collections of facts with which he had 

 to deal. Still his works remain, massive, impressive, enduring — 

 much as the headlands along our southern coast stand out in the 

 distance in their own grand outlines, whilst a close and minute 

 inspection is necessary for the discernment of the forts and fosses 

 added to them, indeed dug out of their substance, in recent times. 

 If we consider what the condition of the subject was when 

 Prichard addressed himself to it, we shall be the better qualified to 

 take and make an estimate of his merits. This Prichard has himself 

 described to us, in a passage to be found in the preface to the 

 third volume of the third edition of the ' Physical History," pub- 

 lished in the year 1841, and reminding one forcibly of a similar 

 utterance of Aristotle's, at the end of one of his logical treatises 

 (' Soph. Elench/ cap. xxxiv. 6). These are his words : — 



' No other writer has surveyed the same field, or any great part 

 of it, from a similar point of view. . . . The lucubrations of 

 Herder and other diffuse writers of the same description, while 

 some of them possess a merit of their own, are not concerned in the 

 same design, or directed towards the same scope. Their object is 

 to portray national character as resulting from combined influences 

 — physical, moral, and political. They abound in generalisations, 

 often in the speculative flights of a discursive fancy, and afford 

 little or no aid for the close induction from facts which is the aim 

 of the present work. Nor have these inquiries often come within 

 the view of writers on Geography, though the history of the 

 globe is very incomplete without that of its human inhabitants.' 



A generation has scarcely passed away since these words were 

 published in 1841 ; we are living in 1875 ; yet what a change has 

 been effected in the condition of Anthropological literature ! The 

 existence of such a dignified quarterly as the ' Archiv fiir Anthro- 

 pologic,' bearing on its titlepage in alphabetical order the honoured 

 names of V. Baer, of Desor, of Ecker, of Hellwald, of His, of Lin- 

 denschmit, of Lucae, of Riitimeyer, of Schaaffhausen, of Semper, 

 of Virchow% of Vogt, and of Welcker, is in itself perhaps the most 

 striking evidence of the advance made in this time, as being the 



