TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION D. — DEPT. ANTHROPOLOGY. 573 



DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY. 



Chairman of the Department — Professor Huxley, 



[PH.D., LL.D., SEC. R.S., F.G.S. 



THURSDAY, AUGUST 15, 1878. 

 The Department did not meet. 



FRIDAY, AUGUST 16, 1878. 



Professor Huxley gave the following Address: — 



When I undertook, with, the greatest possible pleasure, to act as a lieutenant of 

 my friend the President of this Section, I steadfastly purposed to confine myself to 

 the modest and useful duties of that position. For reasons, with which it is not 

 worth while to trouble you, I did not propose to follow the custom which has 

 grown up in the Association of delivering an address upon the occasion of taking 

 the chair of a section or department. In clear memory of the admirable addresses 

 which you have had the privilege of hearing from Professor Flower, and just now 

 from Dr. McDonnell, I cannot doubt that that practice is a very good one ; though 

 I would venture to say, to use a term of philosophy, that it looks very much better 

 from an objective than from a subjective point of view. But I found that my re- 

 solution, like a great many good resolutions that I have made in the course of my 

 life, came to very little, and that it was thought desirable that I should address you 

 in some way. But I must beg of you to understand that this is no formal address. 

 I have simply announced it as a few introductory remarks, and I must ask you to 

 forgive whatever of crudity and imperfection there may be in the mode of expres- 

 sion of what I have to say, although naturally I shall do my best to take care that 

 there is neither crudity nor inaccuracy in the substance of it. It has occurred to me 

 that I might address myself to a point in connection with the business of this de- 

 partment which forces itself more or less upon the attention of everybody, and 

 which, unless the bellicose instincts of human nature are less marked on this side of 

 St. George's Channel than on the other, may possibly have something to do with 

 the large audiences we are always accustomed to see in the Anthropological De- 

 partment. In the Geological Section I have no doubt it will be pointed out to you, 

 or, at any rate, such knowledge may crop up incidentally, that there are on the 

 earth's surface what are called loci of disturbance, where, for long ages, cataclysms 

 and outbursts of lava and the like take place. Then everything subsides into quie- 

 tude ; but a similar disturbance is set up elsewhere. In Antrim, at the middle of the 

 tertiary epoch, there was such a great centre of physical disturbance. We all know 

 that at the present time the earth's crust, at any rate, is quiet in Antrim, while the 

 great centres of local disturbance are in Sicily, in Southern Italy, in the Andes, and 

 elsewhere. My experience of the British Association does not extend quite over a 

 geological epoch, but it does go back rather longer than I care to think about; and 

 when I first knew the British Association, the locus of disturbance in it was the 

 Geological Section. All sorts of terrible things about the antiquity of the earth, 



