8 



NATURE 



{May 3) 1883 



largely of mica-schists and clay-slates. In another 

 memoir just published he furnishes additional informa- 

 tion regarding the succession of these rocks. The old 

 or fundamental (Archaean) rocks composed of gneiss, 

 granite, &c., are overlain by thick masses of reddish 

 sandstones, followed by quartzites and limestones, over 

 which come Augen-gneiss, hornbiende-schist, mica-schist, 

 &c. This order of sequence, which is shown in numerous 

 natural sections, will be at once recognised as that which 

 Murchison first showed to be the straiigraphical succes- 

 sion in the north-west of Scotland. It is interesting to 

 find that the parallelism which was traced many years 

 ago between the structure of the Highlands of Scotland 

 and the uplands of Scandinavia continues to be confirmed 

 by the more detailed surveys of recent years. 



OBSERVATION OF THE GREAT COMET OF 

 1882 



(Communicated by Vice-Admiral Rowan, Superintendent 

 U.S. Naval Observatory) 



Date. 



1825. 



Obs. 



+ 4'06 



Comp. 



+ 14 



Eph. 



Nature, vol. xxvii. p. 226, 

 and Ast. Reg. No. 243, p. 72. 



This observation was made with the 26-inch equatorial, 

 and compared with the following of three bright points 

 in the nucleus. If we had compared the middle point of 

 the nucleus with the comet, the corrections would have 

 been ia= T i 5 '3 A 8 = + o'-3. 



E. Frisby, 

 Washington, April 6 Prof. Math., U.S.N. 



ANTHROPOLOG Y ' 

 I. 



THE invitation to lecture on anthropology with which 

 I have been honoured gives me ireedom to speak 

 both of the races of mankind zoologically, and also of the 

 thoughts, arts, and habits which form their civilisation. 



1 Two lectures on "Anthropology," delivered on February 15 and 21 at 

 the University Museum, Oxford, by E. B. Tylor, D.C.L., F.R.B. 



It is on the development of civilisation that I especially 

 wish to dwell, a subject of direct interest always and to 

 all, and the more opportune now that the practical ques- 

 tion of the instalment of a Museum of Civilisation in 

 Oxford is under discussion. Still, man's bodily and 

 mental history so act and interact on each other that it is 

 well to carry on their study together. Both depend on 

 the great principle of adaptive change, where rise in 

 organisation gives fuller and freer existence, till " corre- 

 spondence with the environment" fixes a more or less 

 permanent state, or suppression or disuse brings on 

 degeneration. These are processes systematised in the 

 theories of development or evolution which have of late 

 years become predominant, and which seek to account 

 for the change of plants and animals on the earth by 

 modified descent, and of mental and moral phenomena 

 by modified sequence. There is a consideration I wish 

 to bring prominently forward, as not having had the 

 attention it deserves. It is that these processes of deve- 

 lopment, or evolution, or transformism were long ago 

 recognised to no small extent by ethnologists. Thus 

 Prichard, the leader of the monogenist school forty years 

 ago, brought forward evidence for the derivation of the 

 races of mankind from one original ancestral pair, whom 

 he considered to have been negroes, whose descendants 

 more or less varying by the operation of natural causes 

 became modified or transformed into the various races 

 adapted for life in the various climates of the earth. But 

 this, so far as it goes, is the very theory of development 

 or modified descent. Any ethnologist who argues on 

 natural grounds " that all the races of man are descended 

 from a single primitive stock," is an evolutionist within 

 these limits ; in fact these words are quoted not from 

 Prichard or Quatrefages, but from Darwin. Within the 

 last generation the science of man has had new evidence 

 and argument brought within its range. The discovery 

 that men were already making rude flint implements in 

 the Quaternary period, when the contours of hill and 

 valley were quite other than during the few thousand years 

 known to chronology, has made a new scientific departure, 

 placing primaeval man in the hands of the geologists, who 

 are now discussing whether he even existed in the yet 

 more vastly remote Tertiary period. A yet greater move 

 has been made by Darwin's systematic application of the 

 principles of variation of breeds or races to account for 

 the transitions between species or genera. How these 

 have become transformed in the course of geological time 

 is seen in Huxley's plate of the bones of the four-toed 

 Orohippus, followed by the three-toed Miohippus and 

 Hipparion, and this again by the horse of the present 

 day. Zoologists thus enabled to reconstruct ideally the 

 ancestry of the horse, are hopeful some day to discover 

 likewise the fossil pedigree of the rider. 



Thus it is plain why the new lines of biological research, 

 whether into the general causes of variation in animals, 

 or into the origin of the human species from a succession 

 of lower mammalian forms, have not checked but stimu- 

 lated the research which relates to man as man. Anthro- 

 pologists do not feel as if their science had been plucked 

 up by the roots and planted somewhere else; it is growing 

 where it was, only cultivated higher than in old times. 

 What substantial progress has been made of late years 

 is well seen in the difficult department of craniology. 

 That there really is something in the shape of a skull will 

 be admitted when one compares the two before us on the 

 table, types which illustrate an interesting point in the 

 early history of our own country. The narrower skull 

 belonged to one of that dolichocephalic Stone Age popu- 

 lation whose remains were buried in the long-barrows on 

 our downs. The broader skull belonged to one of the 

 brachycephalic men of the later round barrows. In the 

 work of Greenwell and Rolleston will be found the ana- 

 tomical comparison of these skull-types, and the evidence 

 that the earlier tribes were not exterminated by the later 



