146 KEPOKT — 1875, 



small-pox epidemic, of the management, or rather mismanagement, of which I had 

 myself some little opportunity of taking stock ; and what we saw then in England 

 renders it a little superfluous to search for recondite causes to account for depopula- 

 tion in coimtries without Local Boards. You owe much in Bristol to your able, en- 

 ergetic, and eminently successful officer of health, Dr. David Davies. I hope he may 

 favour us with his views upon this very interesting subject, and may, knowing, as 

 he well does, how much energy and knowledge are rec[uired for the reduction of a 

 rate of mortality, tell us how much wickedness, perversity, and ignorance are neces- 

 sary for increasiiag such a rate, whether in Great or in Greater Britain. I think that 

 he will tell us that what is mysterious is not the power of the principles of action 

 I have just mentioned, but the toleration of them. Such, at least, are my views*. 



We have several philological papers promised us. Amongst them will be one 

 by the Rev. John Earle, who is linown to you in this neighbourhood as living near 

 Bath, and who is known to people not so pleasantly situated on the earth's surface 

 as you are, as the author of a Handbook of the English tongue. I shall, as he will be 

 present hereafter to speak on philology, spare myself and you the trouble of any 

 remarks on that truly natural science, observing merely that Dr. Farrar t and Pro- 

 fessor Hackel X are both agreed upon one point, namely that the adoption of natiual- 

 history metliods by the students of languages has opened up for them a fresh career 

 of importance and interest and usefidness. 



Somersetshire is not without its historian ; and the possibility of his coming reu- 

 der.s it unad\dsable for me to say any thing now as to the relation of histoiy to our 

 subject upon the present occasion. If, however, the Department can find time to 

 listen to me a second time, I shall be glad to read a short paper myself upon this 

 very subject, mainly in the hope of getting Mr. Freeman to speak upon it also. 



I come now (perhaps I should have come before) to the consideration of the sub- 

 ject of craniology and craniography. Of the value of the entu-ety of the physical 

 history of a race there is no question ; but two very widely opposed views exist as 

 to the value of skull -measuring to the ethnographer. According to the views of one 

 school, craniography and ethuogi'aphy are all but convertible terms ; another set 

 of teachers insist upon the great width of the limits within which normal human 

 crania from one and the same race may oscillate, and upon the small value which, 

 imder such circumstances, we can attach to differences expressed in tenths of inches 

 or even of centimeti-es. As usual, the ti-uth will not be found to lie in either ex- 

 treme view. For the proper performance of a craniogi-aphic estimation, two ^ery 

 different processes are necessary : one is the carrying out and recording a number of 

 measurements ; the other is the artistic appreciation of the general impressions as to 

 contour and type which the survey of a series of skulls produce upon one. I have 

 often thought that the v/orli: of conducting an examination for a scholarship or 

 fellowship is very similarly 'dependent, when it is properly carried out, upon the 

 employment of two methods — one being the system of marking, the other that of 

 getting a general impression as to the power of the several candidates ; and I would 



* Since I wrote as 'above, we have received the news of the miu-der of Commodore 

 Goodeuough at Santa Cruz. Commodore Goodenough was one of those persons to have 

 met whom makes a man feel himself distinctly the better for his interviews and inter- 

 course. He was not only a typical representative of what is called " Armed Science," he 

 not only possessed the eye to watch and the arm to strike, happilj' so common in our two 

 services, but he added to all this a cultivation and refinement duly set forth and typified 

 by manners which were 



" not idle but the fruit 

 Of loyal nature and of noble mind." 



It is indeed a "puzzling world," as it has been forcibly phrased, in which such a man 

 loses his life, and wc lose liis power for good, through the act of what Wordsworth calls 



" A savage, loathsome, vengeful, and impure." 



Still Corfe Castle is near enough to Bristol to prevent us from forgetting tliat we oui-- 

 selves were once as treacherous and murderous as the modern Papuans, and that less than 

 900 years ago. If we have improved, there is hope for them. 



t Farrar on the Growth of Language: pp. 17, 18, Journal of Philology, 1868. 



I Hackel, ' Anthropogenic,' 1874, p. 361. 



