TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION D.— DEPT. ANTHROPOLOGY. 577 



■was nothing more volcanic, more shocking, more subversive of everything right and 

 proper, than to put forward the proposition that as far as physical organisation is 

 concerned there is less difference between man and the highest apes than there 

 is between the highest apes and the lowest. My memory carries me back 

 sufficiently to remind me that, in 1860, that question was not a pleasant one 

 to handle. The other day I was reading a recently-published valuable and in- 

 teresting work, 'L'Espece Humaine,' by a very eminent man, M. de Quatre- 

 fages. He is a gentleman who has made these questions his special study, and 

 has written a great deal and very well about them. He has always maintained 

 a temperate and fair position, and has been the opponent of evolutionary ideas, so 

 that I turned with some interest to his work as giving me a record of what I 

 could look on as the progress of opinion during the last twenty years. If he has 

 any bias at all, it is one in the opposite direction to that in which my own studies 

 would lead me. I cannot quote his words, for I have not the book with me, but 

 the substance of them is that the proposition which I have just put before you is 

 one the truth of which no rational person acqiiainted with the facts could dispute. 

 Such is the difference which twenty years has made in that respect, and speaking in 

 the presence of a great number of anatomists, who are quite able to decide a 

 question of this kind, I believe that the opinion of M. de Quatrefages on the sub- 

 ject is one they will all be prepared to endorse. Well, it is a comfort to have got 

 that much out of the way. The second direction in which I think great progress 

 has been made is with respect to the processes of anthropometry, in other words, 

 in the modes of obtaining those data which are necessary for anthropologists to 

 reason upon. Like all other persons who have to deal with physical science, we 

 confine ourselves to matters which can be ascertained with precision, and nothing 

 is more remarkable than the exactness which has been introduced into the mode of 

 ascertaining the physical qualities of man within the last twenty-five years. One 

 cannot mention the name of Broca without the greatest gratitude ; and I am quite 

 sure that, when Professor Flower brings forward his paper on cranial measurements 

 on Monday next, you will be surprised to see what precision of method and what 

 accuracy are now introduced, compared with what existed twenty-five years ago, 

 into these methods of determining the facts of man's structure. If, further, we 

 turn to those physiological matters bearing on anthropology which have been the 

 subject of inquiry within the last score of years, we find that there has been a vast 

 amount of progress. I would refer you to the very remarkable collection of the 

 data of sociology by Mr. Herbert Spencer, which contains a mass of information 

 useful on one side or the other, in getting towards the truth. Then I would refer 

 you to the highly interesting contributions which have been made by Professor 

 Max Miiller and by Mr. Tylor to the natural history of religions, which is one of 

 the most interesting chapters of anthropology. In regard to another very impor- 

 tant topic, the development of art and the use of tools and weapons, most remark- 

 able contributions have been made by General Lane Fox, whose museum at Bethnal 

 Green is one of the most extraordinary exemplifications that I know of the inge- 

 nuity, and, at the same time, of the stupidity of the human race. Their ingenuity 

 appears in their invention of a given pattern or form of weapon, and their profound 

 stupidity in this, that having done so, they kept in the old grooves, and were thus 

 prevented from getting beyond the primitive type of these objects and of their orna- 

 mentation. One of the most singular things in that museum is the exemplification 

 of the wonderful tendency of the human mind when once it has got into a groove 

 to stick there. The great object of scientific investigation is to run counter to that 

 tendency. 



Great progress has been made in the last twenty years in the direction of the 

 discovery of the indications of man in a fossil state. My memory goes back to 

 the time when anybody who broached the notion of the existence of fossil man 

 would have been simply laughed at. It was held to be a canon of palaeontology 

 that man could not exist in a fossil state. I don't know why, but it was so ; and 

 that fixed idea acted so strongly on men's minds that they shut their eyes to the 

 plainest possible evidence. Within the last twenty years we have an astonishing 

 accumulation of evidence of the existence of man in ages antecedent to those of 

 which we have any historical record. What the actual date of those times was, 



1878. p P 



