756 EEPORT— 1889 



Section H. -ANTHROPOLOGY. 



President of the Section — Professor Sir William Turner, M.B., LL.D., 



F.R.SS. L. & E. 



THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12. 



The following Papers were read : — 



1. On the Advisability of assigning Maries for Bodily Efficiency. in the Ex- 

 aminations of Candidates for the Public Services. By Feancis Galton, 

 F.B.S.—See Reports, p. 471. 



2. On the Principle and Methods of assigning Marks in Examinations on 

 Bodily Efficiency. By Francis Galton, F.B.S. — See Reports, p. 474. 



The President delivered the following Address : — 



On Heredity. 



Taventy-six years have passed hy since the British Association for the Advance- 

 ment of Science last assembled in this city. Many of the incidents of that meeting 

 are still fresh in my memory, the more vividly, perhaps, because it was the first 

 meeting of the Association that I had attended. The weather, so important a 

 factor in most of our functions, was dry and bright. The visitor, instead of being 

 enshrouded in that canopy of mist and smoke which so often meets the traveller 

 as he approaches your city, was greeted with light and sunshine. The cordial 

 welcome and reception so freely granted by the community, and more especially 

 the princely yet gracious hospitality exercised by the President, your eminent 

 townsman, now Lord Armstrong, are all deeply imprinted on my memory. But, 

 apart from these attractions, which added so much to the amenities of the occa- 

 sion, the meeting was one of deep interest to all those Members and Associates 

 who were engaged in biological study. 



Lyell's famous book on the ' Antiquity of Man ' had been published shortly 

 before. The essays on the ' Origin of Species ' by natural selection, by Charles 

 Darwin and Alfred Russel "Wallace, had appeared only five years earlier in the 

 Journal of the Linnsean Society, and in 1859 Darwin's treatise on the 'Origin of 

 Species,' in which its illustrious author summarised the facts he had collected 

 and the conclusions at which he had arrived, had been published. Although no 

 President of the British Association had up to that time given his adhesion to the 

 new theory, yet it was clear that men were beginning to see, in many instances 

 perhaps only dimly, how the theory of evolution by natural selection was destined 

 to work a remarkable change, amounting almost to a revolution, in our conceptions 

 of biological questions generally, and their applicability to the study of man. 



At that time Anthropology had not assumed so definite a position in the work 

 of the Association as it now possesses. Neither a department, nor a section, was 

 devoted to it, and the subjects which it embraces were scattered abroad, either in 



