906 REPORT—1896. 
Section H.—ANTHROPOLOGY. 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION.—ARtTHUR J. Evans, M.A., F.S.A, 
THURSDAY,-SEPTEMBER 17. 
The PrusipEnt delivered the following Address :— 
‘The Hastern Question’ in Anthropology. 
TRAVELLERS have ceased to seek for the ‘Terrestrial Paradise,’ but, in a broader 
sense, the area in which lay the cradle of civilised mankind is becoming generally 
recognised. The plateaux of Central Asia have receded from our view. Anthropo- 
logical researches may he said to have established the fact that the White Race, in 
the widest acceptation of the term, including, that is, the darker-complexioned 
section of the South and West, is the true product of the region in which the 
earliest historic records find it concentrated. Its ‘Area of Characterisation’ is 
-conterminous, in fact, with certain vast physical barriers due to the distribution of 
sea and land in the latest geological period. The continent in which it rose, shut in 
between the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, between the Libyan Desert, and 
what is now Sahara, and an icier Baltic stretching its vast arms to the Ponto- 
‘Caspian basin, embraced, together with a part of anterior Asia, the greater part of 
Europe, and the whole of Northern Africa. The Mediterranean itself—divided 
into smaller separate basins, with land bridges at the Straits of Gibraltar, and 
from Sicily and Malta to Tunis—did not seriously break the continuity of the 
whole. The English Channel, as we know, did not exist, and the old sea-coast of 
what are now the British Islands, stretching far to the west, is, as Professor 
Boyd Dawkins has shown, approximately represented by the hundred-fathom line. 
‘To this great continent Dr. Brinton, who has so ably illustrated the predominant 
part played by it in isolating the white from the African black and the yellow 
races of mankind, has proposed to give the useful and appropriate name of 
“Eurafrica.’ In ‘ Eurafrica,’ in its widest sense, we find the birthplace of the 
highest civilisations that the world has yet produced, and the mother country of 
its dominant peoples. 
It is true that later geological changes have made this continental division no 
longer applicable. The vast land area has been opened to the east, as if to invite 
the Mongolian nomads of the Steppes and Tundras to mingle with the European 
population ; the Mediterranean bridges, on the other hand, have been swept away. 
Asia has advanced, Africa has receded. Yet the old underlying connexion of the 
peoples to the north and south of the Mediterranean basin seems never to have 
been entirely broken. Their inter-relations affect many of the most interesting 
phenomena of archeology and ancient history, and the old geographical unity of 
‘ Eurafrica ’ was throughout a great extent of its area revived in the great political 
system which still forms the basis of civilised society, the Roman Empire. The 
Mediterranean was a Roman lake. A single fact brings home to us the extent to 
