6 THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 



Fifty-six years have come and gone since that history was written ; 



an enormous body of new evidence has poured in upon us. We are now 



able to fill in many pages which Darwin had perforce to leave 



Position has blank, an d we have found it necessary to alter details in his 



become narrative, but the fundamentals of Darwin's outline of Man's 



Impregnable. . .-,■,■«■ i i • • • 



History remain unshaken. Nay, so strong has his position 



become that I am convinced that it never can be shaken. 



Why do I say so confidently that Darwin's position has become 



impregnable ? It is because of what has happened since his death in 



„„. _, . , 1882. Since then we have succeeded in tracing Man by means 

 The Evidence . 



of Fossil of his fossil remains and by his stone implements backwards 



in time to the very beginning of that period of the earth's 



history to which the name Pleistocene is given. We thus reach a point 



in history which is distant from us at least 200,000 years, perhaps three 



times that amount. Nay, we have gone farther, and traced him into the 



older and longer period which preceded the Pleistocene — the Pliocene. It 



was in strata laid down by a stream in Java during the latter part of the 



Pliocene period that Dr. Eugene Dubois found, ten years after Darwin's 



death, the fossil remains of that remarkable representative of primitive 



humanity to which he gave the name Pithecanthropus, or Ape-man ; from 



Pliocene deposits of Bast Anglia Mr. Reid Moir has recovered rude stone 



implements. If Darwin was right, then as we trace Man backwards in 



the scale of time he should become more bestial in form — nearer to the 



ape. That is what we have found. But if we regard Pithecanthropus 



with his small and simple yet human brain as a fair representative of 



the men of the Pliocene period, then evolution must have proceeded 



at an unexpectedly rapid rate to culminate to-day in the higher races 



of Mankind. 



The evidence of Man's evolution from an ape-like being, obtained 



from a study of fossil remains, is definite and irrefutable, but the process 



has been infinitely more complex than was suspected in 

 IVl3,n*s 

 Descent has Darwin's time. Our older and discarded conception of Man's 



™j* be ®?,i n a transformation was depicted in that well-known diagram 

 straight hne. r ° 



which showed a single file of skeletons, the gibbon at one end 

 and Man at the other. In our original simplicity we expected, as we traced 

 Man backwards in time, that we should encounter a graded series of fossil 

 forms — a series which would carry him in a straight line towards an anthro- 

 poid ancestor. We should never have made this initial mistake if we had 



