8 THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 



death, Mr. Charles Dawson discovered this skull and my friend Sir Arthur 



Smith Woodward described it, and rightly recognised that skull and jaw 



were parts of the same individual, and that this individual had lived, as 



was determined by geological and other evidence, in the opening phase of 



the Pleistocene period. We may confidently presume that this individual 



was representative of the people who inhabited England at this remote 



date. The skull, although deeply mineralised and thick-walled, might 



well have been the rude forerunner of a modern skull, but the lower jaw 



was so ape-like that some experts denied that it went with the human 



fossil skull at all, and supposed it to be the lower jaw of some extinct 



kind of chimpanzee. This mistake would never have been made if those 



concerned had studied the comparative anatomy of anthropoid apes. 



Such a study would have prepared them to meet with the discordances 



of evolution. The same irregularity in the progression of parts is evident 



in the anatomy of Pithecanthropus, the oldest and most primitive form of 



humanity so far discovered. The thigh-bone might easily be that of modern 



man, the skull-cap that of an ape, but the brain within that cap, as we 



now know, had passed well beyond an anthropoid status. If merely a 



lower jaw had been found at Piltdown an ancient Englishman would have 



been wrongly labelled ' Higher anthropoid ape ' ; if only the thigh-bone 



of Pithecanthropus had come to light in Java, then an ancient Javanese, 



almost deserving the title of anthropoid, would have passed muster as a 



man. 



Such examples illustrate the difficulties and dangers which beset the 



task of unravelling Man's ancestry. There are other difficulties ; there 



still remain great blanks in the geological record of Man's 



remain in the evolution. As our search proceeds these blanks will be filled 



Geological m jjut m ^ e me antime let us note their nature and their 

 Record. 



extent. By the discovery of fossil remains we have followed 



Man backwards to the close of the Pliocene — a period which endured at 



least for a quarter of a million years, but we have not yet succeeded in 



tracing him through this period. It is true that we have found fossil 



teeth in Pliocene deposits which may be those of an ape-like man or of a 



man-like ape ; until we find other parts of their bodies we cannot decide. 



When we pass into the still older Miocene period — one which was certainly 



twice as long as the Pliocene — we are in the heyday of anthropoid 



history. Thanks to the labours of Dr. Guy E. Pilgrim, of the Indian 



Geological Survey, we know already of a dozen different kinds of 



