14 THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 



physiological inquiries into animal structure, by the isolation of the 

 parasites of human and animal diseases, and by the tracing of the life 

 histories more especially of the minuter forms of animal life. ' Nowa- 

 days ' in the words of Professor J. A. Thomson, ' the serpent that bites 

 man's heel is in nine cases out of ten microscopic' But scarcely less impor- 

 tant are the extensive facilities which Africa stiU offers for the study of the 

 habits and behaviour of the larger mammals. The naturalistic study of 

 these animals, not as stuffed museum species, but in the laboratories of 

 their native environment, has received all too scanty attention from the 

 scientist, and this is a reproach which African Science, with its rich dowry 

 of mammal and primate material, may confidently be expected to remove. 

 Nor will this study of animal behaviour, especially of those animals which 

 approach nearest to the human type, be without its bearings on our in- 

 vestigations of the workings of the human mind. If in this hasty survey 

 I may take time to mention one more point within this field, I would 

 refer to the results which await the intensified activity of the marine 

 biologist and the oceanographer in the as yet all but virgin territory of 

 the African coast-Une. This Association of ours has long dreamed of 

 an African Marine Biological Station as broad in its conception and 

 comparably as useful from the wider scientific and the more narrowly 

 economic points of view as those of Plymouth or Naples or "Woods Hole, 

 and withal a rallying point for the naturalist, the zoologist, the botanist, 

 the geographer, the anatomist, the physiologist, indeed for all those 

 workers whose diverse problems meet at the margin of the sea. 



From Animal Biology we pass by an easy transition to Anthropology, 

 the study of man himself. And here Africa seems full of splendid promise 

 of discovery that may verify Darwin's beUef in the probability that some- 

 where in this land-mass was the scene of nat^lre's greatest creative effort. 

 It would seem to be not without significance that Africa possesses in 

 the chimpanzee and the gorilla those primate types which approach 

 most nearly the form and structure of primitive man. To that must 

 be added that in the Bushman, Pygmy, and negroid races Africa has at 

 least two and possibly three early human stocks which are characteristi- 

 cally her own and belong to no other continent. No less striking is the 

 fact that in Gibraltar, in Malta, and in Palestine, that is, at each and 

 every one of the three portals into Africa from Europe and Asia in 

 Pleistocene times, there have been discovered evidences of the presence 

 of Neanderthal man. In Africa itself there was found at Broken Hill 

 some nine years ago a skull with the most primitive or bestial facial form 



