150 REPORT— 1873. 



more definite form, as when in China the divine ancestors of an emperor will re- 

 proach him for selfish neglect or cruelty to his nation, and even threaten to induce 

 their own highest divine ancestor to punish him for misdeeds. Thus among the 

 ancient Romans the Lares were powerful deities enforcing the moral conduct of the 

 family, and punishing household crime. 



Second, the doctrine of the Future Life begins at the higher levels of savagery 

 to afiect morals. In its first stage the doctrine of metempsychosis is seen devoid 

 of moral meaning, men being re-born as men or animals ; but when the distinction 

 appears in the higher savagery between migration into vile or noble animals, it is 

 not long before this distinction takes the form of reward or punishment of the good 

 .and wicked by their high or low re-incarnation, an idea which is the basis of the 

 Buddhist scheme of retributive moral transmigration through successive bodies. 

 In its earlier stages this doctrine was one of mere continuance, as where South- 

 American tribes expected the spirits of the dead to pass to another region where 

 they would live as on earth. Here the distinctions of earthly rank are carried pn, 

 the chief's soul remaining a chief, and the plebeian's soul a plebeian, but no sign 

 of moral retribution appears. The first stage of this seems to be where warriors 

 slain in battle are admitted to the paradise of chiefs in the land of the Great 

 Spirit. This idea, which comes into view in several districts, leads to the fuller 

 moral scheme in which goodness of any kind, valour, skill, &c. are more and more 

 held to determine the difierence between the next life of the good man in happy 

 lumting-grounds, or of the bad man in some dismal wilderness or subterranean 

 Hades. In the higher nations this element becomes more and more distinctly 

 marked, till the expectation of futm-e reward and the fear of future punishment 

 becomes one of the great motives of human life. 



Third, when theology among the rudest tribes is mostly confined to considera- 

 tion of ghosts, demons, and nature-spirits, the intercourse with these leads to little 

 inculcation of moral action. It is when ideas of the great deities become pre- 

 dominant, when men's minds are turned to the beneficent action of the Sun, or 

 Heaven, or Earth, or to a Supreme Deity yet above these, that it is conceived that 

 the order of nature includes moral order of human conduct. Then, as in the reli- 

 gion of ancient China, the universe and its Supreme Deity are regarded as furnish- 

 ing the model and authority regulating man's actions towards his kindred and his 

 subjects. Thus there presents itself, not at the beginning but the middle of the 

 development of religious ideas among mankind, the leading principle of a moral 

 government of the world and its inhabitants. 



In these three ways it appeai-s, from the evidence of ethnology, that the vast 

 transition was made fi'om the earlier unethical to the later ethical systems of 

 religion. 



GEOGEAPHY. 



Address hy Sir Euthebford Aicock, K.C.B., President ofiJie Section. 



I CANNOT help feeling that my claim to the title of a Geographer is much too 

 slight to wai-rant my appearance here as President of the Geographical Section 

 of the British Association. My misgiving as to the fitness of the choice wouW, 

 indeed, have precluded my accepting the honour, had I not believed that the main 

 object of this Association is to receive and give ventilation to any new ideas or 

 scientific contributions, to secure the attention of a larger audience of scientific 

 men than could otherwise be easily obtained for any special subject, and to pro- 

 mote the free interchange of opinions between persons of various pursuits and 

 qualifications. For this end it is not necessary that the President should himself 

 be competent to take a leading part in discussing the many interesting and scientific 

 subjectswhicharelikely to be brought forward. It is enough, I conceive, that he 

 should appreciate at their just value the studies of those who are willing to com- 



