PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 593 
hand, to explain the universe, since the great days of Alexandria. First, the 
discovery of the Cape route to the Hast threw open to Kuropean observation vast 
tracts of country and an immense number of societies of men whose fame indeed 
had come down through Pliny and Ptolemy, but whom no one but a few traders 
and missionaries had visited in person, since the Arab and the Turk tore East 
and West asunder and began to keep them so. Then, within the same generation, 
the discovery of America opened up, literally, a new world, wherein (among 
many marvels) one of the things which impressed its explorers most vividly 
and constantly was the presence of varieties of men whose mere existence shook 
Adamite theories of mankind to their foundation ; who utterly failed to conform 
to the traditional requirements of the Flood, and professed inveterate ignorance 
on that subject ; and whose manners and customs—when indeed they seemed 
to have any—betrayed a culture, or a lack of culture, totally unlike anything 
which the old world yielded, even taking into account the barbarous Terra 
Nigritarum which lay between the Canaries and India. 
Thus almost at one gift three new sets of human documents were presented 
to the philosophers of Kurope: (1) first-hand knowledge of the famous empires and 
kingdoms of the civilised Kast, of India, China, and the parts of ‘ India beyond 
the Ganges,’ as the saying was, beyond the desert belt of Asia; (2) fresh access to 
the black men, south of the desert belt of Africa; (3) the discovery, beyond the 
no less desert ocean, of new and Western ‘ Indies,’ peopled by wholly un-Indian 
tribes, whose aspect was Tartar rather than Indian or Malay, and whose be- 
haviour seemed all the more inexplicable because it differed totally from what 
was expected so surely by the geographers. 
Bodin, 1577. 
It was long before this mass of new material could be compared and applied 
by the philosophers at home ; but it was collected and recorded with avidity; 
and the insatiable demand for books of travel spread it broadcast, and made it 
sink deep into popular imagination. Still, with all his learning, even Bodin, 
writing in 1577, * Of the Lawes and Customes of a Common Wealth,’ ' hardly shows 
by an allusion that he appreciates the new age that has dawned. There is a 
wonderful chapter, indeed, at the beginning of his fifth book, which is thus 
entitled: ‘ What order and course is to be taken to apply the form of a Common 
Wealth to the diversitie of men’s humors, and the meanes how to discover the 
nature and disposition of a people.’ Its contents show clearly what contri- 
bution he hoped to make to the art of statecraft, and also what was to be his 
method of research, to extract the truth from the mass of conflicting instances. 
It contains the whole pith and kernel of modern anthropo-geography, and com- 
pletely anticipates the ethnological work of Montesquieu; but the data upon 
which it is based are with a single exception such as would have been available 
before the fall of Constantinople. His climatic contrasts are based on the 
Ptolemaic geography; he betrays no knowledge of a habitable south-temperate 
zone, and argues as if the world broke off short at the Sahara. It is only by a 
curious afterthought, which superposes on his classification of environments from 
arctic North to tropic South, a cross-division by grades of culture from civil 
East to barbaric West, that he betrays any hint that his cosmography has been 
disturbed by the new age of exploration. ‘The Spaniards have observed,’ he 
says, ‘that the people of Sina (China), the which are farthest Eastward, are the 
most ingenious and courteous people in the world; and those of Brezill, which 
are farre Westward, the most cruell and barbarous;’* so that East goes with 
South, and West with North, and Bodin’s cultural equator begins to lie askew 
between them ; and we should note that the crucial instance here supplied by 
* those of Brezill ’ is his single glimpse of Columbian man. 
He has, indeed, full grip of the doctrine of a pre-social state, and of the 
application of inductive proof to support it; but his instances are exclusively 
' I quote from the English edition of 1605, ‘out of the French and Latin copies 
done into English by Richard Knowlles, Author of the Turkish History.’ 
? Loe. cit., English Ed., 1605, p. 562. 
1909. 
QQ 
