SEPTEMBER 7, 1899 | 
NATURE 
451 
We may, however, console ourselves with the thought, that 
in the application of the laws of motion themselves to azy 
terrestrial matters, the friction of bodies must always be taken 
into account, and renders it necessary, that we should commence 
by studying the ideal conditions. In this as in other matters, 
the naval architect and engineer must always endeavour as far 
as possible to base their considerations and work upon the 
secure foundation of scientific knowledge, making allowances 
for disturbing causes, which then cease to be the source of per- 
plexity and confusion. From this point of view, the study of 
the behaviour of a perfect liquid, even when no such form of 
matter appears to exist, has an interest for the practical man in 
spite of the deviation of actual liquids from such ideal con- 
ditions. If the truth must be told, it is such a deviation from 
the simple and ideal conditions that really constitute the work 
of a professional man, and it is only practical experience which, 
based upon sound technical knowledge, enables 50,000 tons of 
steel to be made to span the Firth of Forth, Niagara to be 
harnessed to do the work of 100,000 horses, or an Oceanic 
to be slid into the sea with as little misgiving as the launch of 
a fishing-boat. 
Ihave, Iam afraid, brought you only to the threshold of a 
vast subject, and in doing so have possibly employed reasoning 
of too elementary a kind. After all, I may plead that I have 
followed the dictum of Faraday, who said, ‘* If assumptions 
must be made, it is better to assume as. little as possible.” If 
I have assumed too little knowledge on your part, it is because 
of the difficulties I have found in the subject myself. If I have 
left more obscure than I have been able to make clear, it is 
consoling to think how many centuries were required to dis- 
cover even what is known at the present time, and we may 
well be forgiven if we cannot grasp at once results which re- 
present the life-work of some of the greatest men. 
A PROBLEM IN AMERICAN ANTHRO- 
POLOG Y. 
V HILE engaged in writing the address that I am to read to 
you this evening, the sad news reached me of the death, on 
July 31, of our President of five years ago, Dr. D. G. Brinton. 
Although not unexpected, as his health had been failing since he 
was with us at the Boston meeting, where he took his always 
active part in the proceedings of Section H, and gave his wise 
advice in our general council, yet his death affects me deeply. 
I was writing on a subject we had often discussed in an earnest 
but friendly manner. He believed in an all-pervading psycho- 
logical influence upon man’s development, and claimed that 
American art and culture were autochthonous, and that all 
resemblances to other parts of the world were the results of 
corresponding stages in the development of man; while I 
claimed that there were too many root coincidences with 
variant branches to be fully accounted for without also admitting 
the contact of peoples. Feeling his influence while writing, I 
had hoped that he would be present to-night, for I am certain 
that no one would have more readily joined with me in urging 
a suspension of judgment, while giving free expression to 
opinions, until the facts have been worked over anew, and more 
knowledge attained. 
Now that his eloquent tongue is silent and his gifted pen is 
still, I urge upon all who hear me to-night to read his two 
addresses before this Association—one as Vice-President of the 
Anthropological Section in 1887, published in our thirty-sixth 
volume of Proceedings, the other as retiring President in 1895, 
published in our forty-fourth volume. In these addresses he 
had in his usual forcible and comprehensive manner presented 
his views of American anthropological research and of the 
aims of anthropology. 
Dr, Brinton was a man of great mental power and erudition. 
He was an extensive reader in many languages, and his retentive 
memory enabled him to quote readily from the works of others. 
He was a prolific writer, and an able critic of anthropological 
literature the world over. Doing little as a field archeologist 
himself, he kept informed of what was done by others through 
extensive travels and visits to museums. By his death 
American anthropology has suffered a serious loss, and a great 
scholar and earnest worker has been taken from our Associ- 
ation. aus, 
1 Address delivered before the American Association for the Advance- 
ment of Science, at Columbus, Ohio, on August 21, by Prof. Frederic Ward 
Putnam, the retiring President of the Association. 
NO. 1558, VOL. 60] 
In the year 1857 this Association met for the first time beyond 
the borders of the United States, thus establishing its claim to 
the name American in the broadest sense. Already a member 
of a year’s standing, it was with feelings of youthful pride that I 
recorded my name and entered the meeting in the hospitable 
city of Montreal, and it was on this occasion that my mind was 
awakened to new interests which in after years led me from the 
study of animals to that of man. 
On Sunday, August 16, while strolling along the side of 
Mount Royal, I noticed the point of a bivalve shell protruding 
from roots of grass. Wondering why such a shell should be 
there, and reaching to pick it up, I noticed on detaching the 
grass roots about it that there were many other whole and 
broken valves in close proximity—too many, I thought, and 
too near together, to have been brought by birds, and too far 
away from water to be the remnants of a musk-rat’s dinner. 
Scratching away the grass and poking among the shells, I found 
a few bones of birds and fishes and small fragments of Indian 
pottery. Then it dawned upon me that there had been an 
Indian home in ancient times, and that these odds and ends were 
the refuse of the people—my first shell-heap or kitchen-midden, 
as I was to learn later. At the time this was to me simply the 
evidence of Indian occupation of the place in former times, as 
convincing as was the palisaded town of old Hochelaga to 
Cartier when he stood upon this same mountain side more than 
three centuries before. 
At that meeting of the Association several papers were read, 
which, had there been a section of anthropology, would have 
led to discussions similar to those that have occurred during our 
recent meetings. Forty-two years later we are still disputing 
the evidence, furnished by craniology, by social institutions and 
by language, in relation to the unity or diversity of the existing 
American tribes and their pfedecessors on this continent. 
Those were the days when the theory of the unity of all 
American peoples, except the Eskimo, as set forth by Morton 
in his ‘‘ Crania Americana ” (1839), was discussed by naturalists. 
The volumes by Nott and Gliddon, ‘‘Types of Mankind” 
(1854) and ‘‘Indigenous Races of the Earth” (1857), which 
contains Meigs’ learned and instructive dissertation, ‘‘ The 
Cranial Characteristics of the Races of Men,” were the works 
that stirred equally the minds of naturalists and of theologians 
regarding the unity or diversity of man—a question that could 
not then be discussed with the equanimity with which it is now 
approached. The storm caused by Darwin’s ‘Origin of 
Species”? had not yet come to wash away old prejudices and 
clear the air for the calm discussion of theories and facts now 
permitted to all earnest investigators. Well do I remember, 
when, during those stormy years, a most worthy Bishop made a 
fervent appeal to his people to refrain from attending a meeting 
of the Association then being held in his city, on account of 
what he claimed to be the atheistic teachings of science. Yet 
ten years later this same venerable Bishop stood before us, in 
that very city, and invoked God’s blessing upon the noble work 
of the searchers for truth. 
At the meeting of 1857 one of our early presidents, the 
honoured Dana, read his paper entitled ‘‘ Thoughts on Species,” 
in which he described a species as ‘‘a specific amount or con- 
dition of concentrated force defined in the act or law of 
creation,” and, applying this principle, determined the unity of 
man in the following words :— 
‘We have therefore reason to believe, from man’s fertile in- 
termixture, that he is one in species; and that all organic 
species are divine appointments which cannot be obliterated 
unless by annihilating the individuals representing the species.” 
Another paper was by Daniel Wilson, recently from Scotland, 
where six years before he had coined that most useful word 
** prehistoric,’ using the term in the title of his volume, ‘* Pre- 
historic Annals of Scotland.” In his paper Prof. (afterwards Sir 
Daniel) Wilson controverted the statement of Morton that there 
was a single form of skull for all American peoples, north and 
south, always excepting the Eskimo. After referring to the 
views of Agassiz, as set forth in the volumes of Nott and 
Gliddon, he said, ‘‘ Since the idea of the homogeneous physical 
characteristics of the whole aboriginal population of America, 
extending from Terra del Fuego to the Arctic circle, was first 
propounded by Dr. Morton, it has been accepted without 
question, and has more recently been made the basis of many 
widely comprehensive deductions. Philology and archzeology 
have also been called in to sustain this doctrine of a special 
unity of the American race ; and to prove that, notwithstanding 
