TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 849 



tbia cult btt3 produced no pictoriiil or plastic art, it has glveu rise to a series of 

 dances, often pantomimic, and so, parhaps, in the nature of imitative magic, but 

 whether pantomimic or not, accompanied, except m certain exceptional circum- 

 stances, by ofJerings of food to the spirits of the departed. Though others take part 

 in them, these dances are performed especially by men who have been trained to 

 invoice the yaku, as the spirits of the dead are called, and the use of a ceremonial 

 arrow with' a blade over a foot long and a short handle is an indispensable featiire 

 of some of these ceremonies, in all of wliich the ' shaman ' becomes possessed by 

 one or more of the yaku, he invokes. ^ o- i i 



Finally as to language : all Veddas speak Sinhalese or dialect of bmhalese 

 with a predominance of ch sounds which makes Vedda talk sound harsh, and has 

 led to the belief that they have a language of their own ; but in addition many 

 Veddas have also a small number of words which are not obviously Sinhalese, or 

 are Sinhalese periphrases ; these classes of words are specially used in hunting 

 and in addressing the yaku. 



FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 4. 



The following Papers were read :— 



1. Anthropological Work in Egypt. 

 By Professor G. Elliot Smith, M.A., M.D., F.E.S. 



The earliest known human remains found in the Nile Valley, when Compared 

 with those of later times, demonstrate the fact that in predynastic times Egypt 

 and Nubia were inhabited by one and the same race, which has persisted in Egypt 

 with little or no change in physical characteristics throughout the intervening six 

 thousand years until the present day. They were and are a small people, the 

 average height of the men being about 5 feet 3 inches at every period of their 

 history ; their hair is very dark brown or black, usually wavy, but not ' woolly ' 

 or in any sense negroid ; their heads are long and narrow, usually ovoid or 

 pentao-onoid or ' coffin-shaped,' as the result of a frequent presence of a protuberant 

 occiput. On the whole they share those characteristics which distinguish the 

 • majority of the peoples fringing the Mediterranean— the populations of Sicily, 

 Italy, Southern France, Spain, Algeria, and Tunis. 



The physical characters of the population are remarkably uniform ; they 

 exhibit a range of variation, which is not appreciably greater than that of the 

 purest races known to us, though, of course, it is easy to select the extremes of 

 these variations and call them ' coarse ' and 'fine' types or 'negroid' and 'non- 

 negroid ' strains. 



As we should expect in a group of people that has lived from the dawn of 

 history on the fringe of the negro territory, there is some slight evidence of aii 

 infusion of black blood, but this is very small in amount, and its effects very 

 much slighter and less widely dilfused thau is commonly supposed to be the case. 

 The negro influence is least marked, if indeed it is not a negligible factor, in the 

 earliest predynastic times ; but it becomes more and more pronounced in later, and 

 especially so in modern, times. 



From the time of the earliest Egyptian dynasties a noteworthy change occurs 

 in the physical characteristics of the people of Nubia, and, though in a very much 

 slighter degree, in Lower Egypt. The inroad of negroes from the South leads 

 to the transformation of the Nubian population into a hybrid race. And there is 

 some evidence to show that even at the time of the pyramid-builders there was 

 some influx of an alien race from the Levant, which intermingled with th3 

 predominant Egyptian population of the Delta. 



Three thousand years later a much greater immigration of people presenting 

 the same alien characteristics poured into Egypt and Nubia. From this time 

 onwards these foreign immigrants came to Egypt in a constant stream ; and as 

 they intermarried with their co-religionists— the Christian Copts— it happens that 



1908. 3 1 



