THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 9 



great anthropoids which lived in Himalayan jungles during middle 

 and later Miocene times ; we know of at least three other kinds of 

 great anthropoids which lived in the contemporary jungles of 

 Europe. Unfortunately we have found as yet only the most resistant 

 parts of their bodies — teeth and fragments of jaw. Do some of these 

 fragments represent a human ancestor ? We cannot decide until a lucky 

 chance brings to light a limb-bone or a piece of skull, but no one can 

 compare the teeth of these Miocene anthropoids with those of primitive 

 man, as has been done so thoroughly by Prof. William K. Gregory, and 

 escape the conviction that in the dentitions of the extinct anthropoids of 

 the Miocene jungles we have the ancestral forms of human teeth. 



It is useless to go to strata still older than the Miocene in search of 

 Man's emergence ; in such strata we have found only fossil traces of 

 Date of Man's emerging anthropoids. All the evidence now at our disposal 

 Emergence. supports the conclusion that Man has arisen, as Lamarck 

 and Darwin suspected, from an anthropoid ape not higher in the zoological 

 scale than a chimpanzee, and that the date at which human and anthropoid 

 lines of descent began to diverge lies near the beginning of the Miocene 

 period. On our modest scale of reckoning, that gives Man the respectable 

 antiquity of about one million years. 



Our geological search, which I have summarised all too briefly, has 



not produced so far the final and conclusive evidence of Man's anthropoid 



. . origin ; we have not found as yet the human imago emerging 

 Proofs of our B J ° 



Anthropoid from its anthropoid encasement. Why, then, do modern 

 anthropologists share the conviction that there has been an 

 anthropoid stage in our ancestry ? They are no more blind than you are 

 to the degree of difference which separates Man and ape in structure, in 

 appearance and in behaviour. I must touch on the sources of this con- 

 viction only in a passing manner. Early in the present century Prof. 

 G. H. F. Nuttall, of Cambridge University, discovered a trustworthy and 

 exact method of determining the affinity of one species of animal to another 

 by comparing the reactions of their blood. He found that the blood of Man 

 and that of the great anthropoid apes gave almost the same reaction. 

 Bacteriologists find that the living anthropoid body possesses almost the 

 same susceptibilities to infections, and manifests the same reactions, as 

 does the body of Man. So alike are the brains of Man and anthropoid 

 in their structural organisation that surgeons and physiologists transfer 

 experimental observations from the one to the other. When the human 



