THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 7 



remembered that trie guide to the world of the past is the world of the 



present. In our time Man is represented not by one but by many and 



diverse races— black, brown, yellow, and white ; some of these are 



rapidly expanding, others are as rapidly disappearing. Our searches 



have shown that in remote times the world was peopled, sparsely it is 



true, with races showing even a greater diversity than those of to-day, 



and that already the same process of replacement was at work. To 



unravel Man's pedigree, we have to thread our way, not along the links 



of a chain, but through the meshes of a complicated network. 



We made another mistake. Seeing that in our search for Man's 



ancestry we expected to reach an age when the beings we should have to 



deal with would be simian rather than human, we ought to 



T f h t^™ erSity have marked the conditions which prevail amongst living 

 oi form 



in Ancient anthropoid apes. We ought to have been prepared to and, 

 as we approached a distant point in the geological horizon, 

 that the forms encountered would be as widely different as are the gorilla, 

 chimpanzee and orang, and confined, as these great anthropoids now are, 

 to limited parts of the earth's surface. That is what we are now realising ; 

 as we go backwards in time we discover that mankind becomes broken up, 

 not into separate races as in the world of to-day, but into numerous and 

 separate species. When we go into a still more remote past they become 

 so unlike that we have to regard them not as belonging to separate species 

 but different genera. It is amongst this welter of extinct fossil forms 

 which strew the ancient world that we have to trace the zigzag line of 

 Man's descent. Do you wonder we sometimes falter and follow false 



clues ? 



We committed a still further blunder when we set out on the search 

 for Man's ancestry : indeed, some of us are still making it . We expected that 

 Discordant Man ' s evolution would pursue not only an orderly file of stages 

 Evolution. but that every part of his body — skull, brain, jaws, teeth, skin, 

 body, arms, and legs— would at each stage become a little less ape-like, 

 a little more Man-like. Our searches have shown us that Man's evolution 

 has not proceeded in this orderly manner. In some extinct races, while 

 one part of the body has moved forwards another part has lagged 

 behind. Let me illustrate this point because it is important. We now 

 know that, as Darwin sat in his study at Downe, there lay hidden at 

 Piltdown, in Sussex, not thirty miles distant from him, sealed up in a bed 

 of gravel, a fossil human skull and jaw. In 1912, thirty years after Darwin's 



