TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. .887 



which form our only sources of knowledge concerning prehistoric races of men, 

 generally come to us as much altered from their original forms as are the rusty 

 polyhedra which once were the receptacles for biscuits or sardines. The tradi- 

 tions, customs, and scraps of folk-lore which are treasures to the constructive 

 anthropologist are usually discovered as empty shells, in form as much altered 

 from their original conditions as are those smooth fragments of hoUow white 

 cylinders which once held the delicate products of the factory of Keiller or Cairns. 



I have said that anthropology has not yet made good its title to be ranked as 

 an independent science. This is indicated by the difficulty of framing a definition 

 at the same time comprehensive and distinctive. Mr. Galton characterises it as 

 the study of what men are in body and mind, how they came to be what they 

 are, and whither the race is tending ; General Pitt-Rivers, as the science which 

 ascertains the true causes for all the phenomena of human life. I shall not try to 

 improve upon these definitions, although they both are manifestly defective. On the 

 one side our subject is a branch of biology, but we are more than biologists compiUng 

 a monograph on the natiu-al history of our species, as M. de Quatrefages would 

 have it. Many of the problems with which we deal are common to us and to 

 psychologists ; others are common to us and to students of history, of sociology, of 

 philology, and of religion ; and, in addition, we have to treat of a large number of 

 other matters aesthetic, artistic, and technical, which it is difficult to range under 

 any subordinate category. 



In view of the encyclopaedic range of knowledge necessary for the equipment 

 of an accomplished anthropologist, it is little wonder that we should be, as we 

 indeed are, little better than smatterers. Its many-sided affinities, its want of 

 definite limitation, and the recent date of its admission to the position of an 

 independent brancli of knowledge have hitherto caused anthropology to fare badly 

 in our universities. In this respect, however, we are improving, and now in the 

 two great English universities there are departments for the study of tlie natural 

 history of man and of his works. 



Out of the great assemblage of topics which come within our sphere I can only 

 select a few which seem at present to demand special consideration. The annual 

 growth of our knowledge is chiefly in matters of detail which are dull to chronicle, 

 and the past year has not been fertile in discoveries bearmg on those great 

 questions which are of popular interest. 



On the subject of the antiquity of man there are no fresh discoveries of serious 

 importance to record. My esteemed predecessor at the Leeds meeting two years 

 ago, after reviewing the evidence as to the earliest traces of humanity, concluded 

 his survey with the judgment, ' On the whole, therefore, it appears to me that the 

 present verdict as to 'Tertiary man must be in the form of " Not Proven."' Sub- 

 sequent research has not contributed any new facts which lead us to modify that 

 finding. The most remarkable of the recent discoveries under this head is that of 

 the rude implements of the Kentish chaUi-plateau described by Professor Prest- 

 wich ; but while these are evidently of archaic types, it must be admitted that 

 there is even yet room for dift'erence of opinion as to their exact geological age._ 



Neither has the past year's record shed new light on the darkness which 

 ■enshrouds the origin of man. What the future may have in store for us in the 

 way of discovery we cannot forecast ; at present we have nothmg but hypothesis, 

 and we must still wait for further knowledge with the calmness of philosophic 



expectancy. 



I may, however, in this connection refer to the singularly niteresting observa- 

 tions of Dr. Louis Robinson on the prehensile power of the hands of children at 

 birth, and to the graphic pictures with which he has illustrated his paper. Dr. 

 Robinson has drawn, from the study of the one end of life, the same conclusion 

 which Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson deduced from the study of his grandfather, 

 that there still survive in the human structure and habit traces of our probably 

 arboreal ancestry. 



Turning from these unsolved riddles of the past to the survey of mankmd as it 

 appears to us in the present, we are confronted m that wide range of outlook with 

 many problems well-nigh as difficult and obscure. 



