ORDINARY MEETING, Frsrvary 2, 1885. 
Tue Richt Hon. A. S. Ayrton, In THE CHAIR. 
The Minutes of the last Meeting were read and confirmed. 
ON THE EVOLUTION OF SAVAGES BY DEGRA- 
DATION. By the Rey. F. A. Auten, M.A. 
UR attention has been so exclusively occupied of late 
years with the Darwinian theory of Development, that 
the fact of the existence of numerous cases of Retrogression 
by degradation has been very much cast into the shade, and 
yet the attentive student of history and ethnology finds almost 
as much evidence for the one process as for the other. 
If the illustrious names of Lamarck, Darwin, Sir John 
Lubbock, Haeckel, Crawford, Tylor, Tyndall, and Huxley can 
be cited on the one side, the no less illustrious names of 
Niebuhr, Dr. Doig (who converted Lord Kaimes to his view), 
De Maistre, Archbishop Whately, and Professor Max Miiller 
can be claimed for the other. 
Without going quite so far as Dr. South, who, in a 
sermon preached at St. Paul’s in 1662,* rhetorically declared 
that “an Aristotle was but the rubbish of an Adam, and 
Athens but the rudiments of Paradise,” we may be permitted 
* See South’s Works, t. i. 32 (ed, 1842). 
