782 KEPORT— 1891. 



Section H.— ANTHROPOLOaY. 



Pbesident of the Section — Professor F. Max Muller, M.A., Foreign Member 

 of the French Institute. 



THURSDAY, AUGUST 20. 

 The Pbesident delivered the following Address : — 



It was forty-four years ago that for the first and for the last time I was able to 

 take an active part in the meetings of the British Association for the Advancement 

 of Science. It was at Oxford, in 1847, when I read a paper on the ' Relation of 

 Bengali to the Aryan and Aboriginal Languages of India,' which received the 

 honour of being published in full in the 'Transactions' of the Association for that 

 year. I have often regretted that absence from England and pressure of work 

 have prevented me year after year from participating in the meetings of the Asso- 

 ciation. But, being a citizen of two countries — of Germany by birth, of England 

 by adoption — my long vacations have generally drawn me away to the Continent, 

 so that to my great regret I found myself precluded from sharing either in your 

 labours or in your dehghtful social gatherings. 



I wonder whether any of those who were present at that brilliant meeting at 

 O.xford in 1847 are present here to-day. I almost doubt it. Our President then 

 was Sir Robert Inglis, who will always be known in the annals of English history 

 as having been prefeiTed to Sir Robert Peel as Member of Parliament for the 

 University of Oxford. Among other celebrities of the day I remember Sir 

 Roderick Murchison, Sir David Brewster, Dean Buckland, Sir Charles Lyell, Pro- 

 fessor Sedgwick, Professor Owen, and many more — a galaxy of stars, all set or 

 setting. Young Mr. Ruskin acted as Secretary to the Geological Section. Our 

 Section was then not even recognised as yet as a Section. We ranked as a sub- 

 Sectiou only of Section D, Zoology and Botany. We remained in that subordinate 

 position till 1851, when we became Section f], under the name of Geography and 

 Ethnology. From 1869, however, Ethnology seems almost to have disappeared 

 again, being absorbed in Geography, and it was not till the year 1884 that we 

 emerged once more as what we are to-day, Section H, or Anthropology . 



lu the year 1847 our sub-Section was presided over by Professor A^'ilson, the 

 famous Sanskrit scholar. The most active debaters, so far as I remember, were 

 Dr. Prichard, Dr. Latham, and Mr. Crawfurd, well known then under the name of 

 the Objector-General. I was invited to join the meeting by Bunsen, then Prussian 

 Minister in London, who also brought with him his friend, Dr. Karl Meyer, the 

 Celtic scholar. Prince Albert was present at our debates, so was Prince Louis 

 Lucien Bonaparte. Our Ethnological sub-Section was then most popular, and 

 attracted very large audiences. 



When looking once more through the debates carried on in our Section in 1847 

 I was very much surprised when I saw how very like the questions which occupy 

 us to-day are to those which we discussed in 1847. I do not mean to say that there 

 has been no advance in our science. Far from it. The advance of linguistic, ethno- 

 logical, anthropological, and biological studies, all of which claim a hearing in our 



