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Section H.— ANTHROPOLOGY. 

 President of the Section — Professor A. II. Saycb, M.A. 



THUnSDA Y, SEPTEMBER 1. 



The President delivered the followiug Address : — 



SuRrRisE has sometimes been expressed that anthropology, the science of man, 

 should have been the last of the sciences to come into being. But the fact is not so 

 strange as it seems at first sight to be. Science originated in curiosity, and the 

 curiosity of primitive man, like the curiosity of a child, was first exercised upon the 

 objects around him. The fact that we are separate from the world about us, and 

 that the world about us is our own creation, is a conviction which grows but slowly 

 in the mind either of the individual or of the race in general. The child says, 

 * Charley likes this,' before he learns to say, ' 1 like this,' and in most languages the 

 objective case of the personal pronoun exhibits earlier forms than the nominative. 



Moreover, it is only through the relations that exist between mankind and 

 external nature that we can arrive at anything like a scientific knowledge of man. 

 Science, it must be remembered, unplies the discovery of general laws, and general 

 laws are only possible if we deal, not with the single individual, but with indi- 

 viduals when grouped together in races, tribes, or communities. We can never 

 take a photograph of the mind of an individual, but we can come to know the 

 principles that govern the actions of bodies of men, and can employ the inductive 

 method of science to discover the physical and moral characteristics of tribes and 

 races. It is through the form of the skull, the nature of the language, the manners 

 and customs, or the religious ideas of a people that we can gain a true conception 

 of their history and character. The thinker who wishes to carry out the precept 

 of the Delphian oracle and to 'biow himself must study himself as reflected in 

 the community to which he belongs. The sum of the sciences which deal with the 

 relations of the community to tbe external world will constitute the science of 

 anthropology. 



The field occupied by the science is a vast one, and the several workers in it 

 must be content to cultivate portions of it only. The age of ' admirable Crichtons' 

 is past ; it would be impossible for a single student to cover with equal success the 

 whole domain of anthropology. All that he can hope to do is to share the labour 

 ■with others, and to concentrate his energies on but one or two departments in the 

 wide field of research. A day may come when the work we have to perform will 

 be accomplished, and our successors will reap the harvest that we have sown. But 

 meanwhile we must each keep to our own special line of investigation, asking only 

 that others whose studies have lain in a different direction shall help us with the 

 results they have obtained. 



I shall therefore make no apology for confining myself on the present occasion 

 to those branches of anthropological study about which I Imow most. It is more 

 particularly to the study of language, and the evidence we may derive from it as 

 to the history and development of mankind, that 1 wish to direct your attention. 

 It is in language that the thoughts and feelings of man are mirrored and embodied; 

 it is through language that we learn the little we know about what is passing in 

 the minds of others. Language is not onlv a means of intercommunication, it is 



