TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H.—PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 515 
Section H.—ANTHROPOLOGY. 
PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION.—Sir EverarD mm TuurN, C.B., K.C.M.G. 
The President delivered the following Address at Sydney, on Friday, 
August 21 :— 
A Study of Primitive Character. 
CIVILISATION and ‘savagery ’—for unfortunately it seems now too late to substi- 
tute any term of less misleading suggestion for that word ‘savagery ’—are the 
labels which we civilised folk apply respectively to two forms of human culture 
apparently so unlike that it is hard to conceive that they had a common origin 
—our own culture and that other, the most primitive form of human culture, 
from which, at some unknown and distant period, our own diverged. But, 
assuming one common origin for the whole human race, we anthropologists can 
but assume that at an early stage in the history of that race some new idea was 
implanted in a part of these folk, that is in the ancestors of civilised folk, which 
caused these thenceforth to advance continuously, doubtless by many again subse- 
quently diverging and often intercrossing roads, some doubtless more rapidly 
than others, but all mainly towards that which is called civilisation, while those 
others, those whom we call ‘savages,’ were left behind at that first parting of 
the ways, to stumble blindly, advancing indeed after a fashion of their own, but 
comparatively slowly and in a quite different direction. 
lt is easy enough for civilised folk, when after age-long separation they again 
come across the ‘savages,’ to discern the existence of wide differences between 
the two, in physical and mental characteristics, and in arts and crafts; it is not 
so easy, it may even be that it is impossible, to detect the exact nature of these 
differences, especially in the matter of mental characters. 
As a rule the occupant of this presidential chair is one who, whether he 
has seen much of ‘savages’ at close quarters or not, has had much ampler 
opportunity than has fallen to my lot of comparative study of that great mass of 
anthropological observations which, gathered from almost every part of the 
world, has now been recorded at headquarters. I, on the other hand, happen to 
have spent the better part of my active life in two different parts of the world, 
remote from books and men of science, but in both of which folk of civilised and 
of savage culture have been more or less intermixed, but as yet very imperfectly 
combined, and in both of which I have been brought into rather unusually close 
and sympathetic contact with folk who, whatever veneer of civilisation may have 
been put upon them, are in the thoughts which lie at the back of their minds and 
eee exacter still almost as when their ancestors were at the stage of savage 
culture. 
While trying to adjust the mutual relations of wild folk and of folk of 
civilised stock, I have seen from close at hand the clash which is inevitable when 
the two meet—a clash which is naturally all the greater when the meeting is 
sudden. Moreover, having started with a strong taste for natural history, and 
especially for the natural history of man, and having had much guidance from 
many anthropological friends and from books, I have perhaps been especially 
fortunate in opportunity for studying the more natural human animal at close 
quarters and in his natural surroundings. I have tried, from as abstract and 
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