TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. — PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 651 



Section H.— ANTHROPOLOGY. 

 President of the Section. — Professor C. G. Seligman, M.D. 



WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 8. 



The President delivered the following Address : — 



It is impossible to pass to the subject of my address without first referring to 

 the heavy losses which the Teutonic lust of power has inflicted upon our science, 

 no less than upon every other department of humane and beneficent activity. 

 Whatever loss we may yet be called upon to endure there can hardly be any more 

 regrettable than the death of Joseph Dechelette, whose acknowledged eminence 

 makes any detailed account of his labours superfluous. I will but mention his 

 Manuel d'Archcolofjie, a work of rare lucidity, wliich though unfinished (the 

 pity of it) will long be authoritative upon European prehistory and arch;eology. 

 His valour was no less than his erudition, for though his age exempted him from 

 all military duties, he insisted on taking his place at the head of his old company 

 of Territorials, and was killed last October while leading his men in a charge 

 that carried the line forward 300 yards. How he died may be learnt from 

 the official army order quoted in L'Anthropologie (vol. 25, p. 581). We have 

 also to mourn the death of Robert Hertz, a regular contributor to L' Annie 

 Sociologiqiie, and of Jean Maspero, son of Sir Gaston Maspero, an authority on 

 the Byzantine period and Arabic geography. 



The other men whose premature death we deplore belong for the most part 

 to that brilliant band of French soldier-explorers to which African ethnography 

 owes so much. Captain Rene Avelot, whose name will be known to every reader 

 of L' Anthropologic, was also the author of important papers in La Geographie 

 and other geographical periodicals. He had hoped to devote himself entirely 

 to ethnological work, and at the outbreak of war was about to publish a series of 

 studies on the natives of the French Congo, Darfur, and Wadai. Before going 

 to the front he arranged for the publication of these, even in the event of his 

 death. 



Captain Morice Cortier, a geographer and an explorer rather than an ethno- 

 logist, was engaged at the time of his death in preparing a work on the pre- 

 history of the Sahara. 



Captain Maurice Bourlon received his scientific training in the Dordogne. He 

 conducted excavations in the neighbourhood of Les Eyzies, where he made a 

 number of discoveries, and brought to light some remarkable specimens of 

 palfeolithic art. 



We dare not hope that the foregoing list is final, and while mourning their 

 loss we cannot pay greater honour to their memory than by taking up the burden 

 they relinquished in the hour of their country's supreme need. 



In my address I shall endeavour to outline the early history of the Anglo- 

 Egyptian Sudan from the standpoint of the ethnologist, and thus indicate some 

 of the lines upon which future research may most usefully proceed. Fortunately 

 the Sudan is one of those areas in which the site and scope of work may be 

 selected from the point of view of immediate scientific interest, without any grave 

 dereliction of duty. There is not the danger so frequently met with, in the 



