108 KEPORT— 1866. 



races of man are still confined to these primitive articles. The most important 

 of these food-jDlants are those which can be made into bread, such as the cereals. 

 With the exception of rice, not one of the cereals can be traced with imdoubted 

 certainty, nor can we state their parent countries : this must be received as evidence 

 of the vast antiquity of their cultivation. Wheat and barley must have been well 

 Imown to the Egyjitians before the earliest of the pyramids was built, for a people 

 feeding on roots and fruits could not have possessed the power or the skill indis- 

 pensable to the construction of those stupendous monuments. With regard to 

 legumes, several of the cidtivated kinds can be traced to their wild originals. Lan- 

 guage often throws light on the birthplace and migi-ation of cultivated plants, and 

 the result of this line of investigation in regard to the cereals has been to show 

 that they originated at many separate points. The influence of the various food- 

 plants on the character and civilization of the races of man was dilated upon by 

 the author, who concluded that no people ever attained a tolerable degi-ee of 

 cultivation without the possession of the higher cerealia. Had the food of the 

 Britons some 2000 years ago been confined to the potato, Julius Ctesar would 

 unquestionably have foimd our ancestoi-s far greater barbai'ians than he describes 

 them to have been. 



On the Invention and History of Written Languayes. 

 By John Ckawftjed, F.E.S. 

 The first attempts of man towards making a visible record of ideas must have 

 consisted of pictorial representations of natural objects. The imperfect and un- 

 tractable nature of sjmbolic writing must, however, have early presented itself to 

 most nations, and accordingly two people onlj', the Egyptians and Chinese, ap- 

 peared to have persevered in using it. Among the more precocious races of man 

 gifted with a fair share of intellectual capacity, vocal or phonetic -^Titing seems to 

 have been invented as soon as such a state of society had been reached as allowed 

 of the existence of a class of men that had leisure for meditation. There conse- 

 quently exists hardly a nation of Asia, from the Mediterranean to the western 

 confines of China, that has not invented phonetic WTiting and been immemorially in 

 possession of alphabets of more or less perfection in proportion to their degrees of 

 civilization. 



On some of the Bearinys of Archaohyy u])on certain Ethnoloyical Problems 

 and Eesearches. By R. Dunn, F.R. C.S., Vice-President of the Ethnoloyical 

 Society of London. 



Mr. Dimn began by remarking that there was a fascination about the subject 

 of prehistoric times and prehistoric man — about the revolutions of our globe as 

 revealed to us by geological investigation, and of the generations of mankind by 

 arch.'cological researches, and that the very obscurity of the subject whets our zeal 

 in its investigation, lie asked what could be more fascinating than the wonders 

 of geology as we ponder over the revolutions which the earth has undergone — 

 search after the evidences of the first appearance of life upon its sm-face, and 

 recognize in its successive and changing phases the varying animal forms, rising 

 higher and still higher in the complexity of their structure up to the advent of 

 man himself — to us the crowning theme of all these wonders. But when did he 

 first appear ? Was he pliocene, miocene, or still more ancient ? All that we can 

 assume is that in the fullness of time, when the earth was fitted for his reception 

 by the fiat of the Almighty, man made his appearance. Then -s^-as brought into 

 existence a being in whom that subtle force which we call miixtsvsxs the grand and 

 distinguished attribute, raising him so immeasurably in the scale of being above 

 the whole brute creation. He dwelt on the antiquity of man, remarking that the 

 men of the Drift shared the possession of the forest-clad valleys and ])lains of 

 Europe -ndth the mammoth, the cave bear, and the woolly-haired rhinoceros, when 

 the British isles were alike imited to one another and to the continent of Europe ; 

 observing Lartet's exploration of the Cave of Aurigiiac in the Pyrenees, not only 

 as provmg the high antiquity of man, but as tracing back the sacred rights of 

 bmial, and also the still more important belief in a future state of existence, to 



