116 REPORT—1874. 
which determines the formation of hydrocyanic acid from emulsine, and the myro- 
sin which similarly induces the formation of oil of mustard. We need not wonder, 
then, if the fluid secreted by a plant should prove to possess the ingredients neces- 
sary for the digestion of insoluble animal matters. 
These remarks will, I hope, lead you to see that though the processes of plant- 
nutrition are in general extremely different from those of animal-nutrition, and 
involve very simple compounds, yet that the protoplasm of plants is not absolutely 
prohibited from availing itself of food such as that by which the protoplasm of 
animals is nourished ; under which point of view these phenomena of carniyorous 
plants will find their place as one more link in the continuity of nature. 
ANTHROPOLOGY. 
Address to the Department of Anthropology. By Sir Wittiam R. Witz, 
M.D., M.R.IA., Chevalier of the Order of the Polar Star of Sweden. 
I have to thank the Association for haying honoured me with the Directorship 
of the Anthropological Department of the Biological Section. It will be in the 
recollection of some of those I have the honour of addressing, that when this 
Association last met in Dublin, in 1857, I had the pleasing duty of conducting a 
large section of some of its most distinguished members to the Western Islands of 
Aran off the coast of Galway—the last fortified resting-place of one of the earliest 
races that occupied this island, and who, with their faces turned to the far West, 
may have had some dim notion in their minds (even at the time of their expulsion 
from the mainland) of that exodus which was carried out by other means than 
man’s unaided hand in our own time. 
I cannot refrain here from alluding to a personal as well as public loss which I 
and the British Association have sustained in the death of one of its most ardent 
original promoters and one of its most hard-working officers. Learned in a vast 
variety of pursuits—unflageing in whatever he took in hand—exact in his know- 
ledge—energetic in his investigations — not discursive, but rather chary in his 
friendships, yee always courteous and willing to lend a helping hand to the 
beginner (as I and others know)—lived and died Professor Phillips, of Oxford. 
Anthropology :—“ the science of man,” so called ; his origin, age, and distribution 
on our globe; his physical conformation and susceptibility of cultivation; his 
various forms of speech; his laws, habits, manners, customs, weapons, and tools; 
his archaic markings, as also his pictorial remains; his tombs; his ideographie and 
phonetic or alphabetic writing, down to his present culture in different countries ; 
and his manufactures, arts, and degrees of intelligence in his different phases of life 
throughout the world,—are all presented for investigation by this Section of the 
Association. 
How am I to treat this vast subject during the short space allowed for the 
delivery of an address? Suppose I were to confine myself to what has been done 
during the past year, I might, by carefully culled accounts, present you with the 
physical characters, customs, and arts of the Ashantees with whom we have so 
lately come in contact; or, again, I might refer to those discoveries on the 
Troad that so vividly bring before us some of the arts and sciences described by 
Homer, and gis rel those ornaments and utensils that show cultivation of a 
peculiar kind in pottery and metal work, especially of gold, belonging to a ve 
remote era. I say peculiar, because 1 think we are too much in the habit of attri- 
buting high cultivation in social life, morals, and domestic virtues to those peoples 
whose remains present specimens of great metallurgic skill or a taste for the 
ceramic art. 
Concerning the investigations so admirably conducted by Dr. Schliemann, we must 
all regret that Sir John Lubbock’s proposition to the Government—to expend a 
few paltry thousands in allowing England to put its sickle into the harvest and 
reap some of the golden grain illustrative of the time of Homer and his contem- 
