xciv REPORT—1858. 
The Hottentots and Caffres are more distinct, linguistically and physically, 
than the former are from equatorial Negroes, or the latter from the Nubians ; 
yet they both inhabit one well-marked zoological province, South Africa. 
Two varieties of mankind—the Papuan and Malayan—inhabit Borneo 
and other islands at the eastern part of the Indian Archipelago; these 
islands forming one and the same zoological and botanical province. 
Not less than twenty colours have been found requisite to indicate in a 
map of the British Islands the different varieties and sub-varieties of the 
human race that have contributed to its miscellaneous population. 
Other facts of the same kind might be cited, affecting the conformity of 
the distribution of man with that of the lower animals and plants, as abso- 
lutely enunciated in some recent works. Nor can we be surprised to find 
that the migratory instincts of the human species, with the peculiar endow- 
ment of adaptiveness to all climates, should have produced modifications 
in geographical distribution to which the lower forms of living nature have 
not been subject. It is only since man began to exercise his privilege and 
power, that the geographical laws in regard to the lower animals of existing 
species have begun to be blotted out. 
Ethnology is a wide and fertile subject, and I should be led far beyond 
the limits of an inaugural discourse were I to indulge in an historical sketch 
of its progress. But I may advert to the uniform testimony of different 
witnesses—to the concurrence of distinct species of evidence—as to the 
much higher antiquity of the human race, than has been assigned it in 
historical and genealogical records. 
Mr. Leonard Horner sagaciously discerned the value of the phenomena of 
the annual sedimentary deposits of the Nile in Egypt as a test of the lapse 
of time during which that most recent and still operating geological dynamic 
had been in progress. In two memoirs communicated to the Royal Society 
in 1855 and 1858, the results of ninety-five vertical borings through the 
alluvium thus formed are recorded. 
The Nile sediment at the lowest depth reached is very similar in composi- 
tion to that of the present day. In the lowest part of the boring of the sedi- 
ment at the colossal statue in Memphis, at a depth of 39 feet from the sur- 
face of the ground, the boring-instrument is reported to have brought up a 
piece of pottery. This Mr. Horner infers to be a record of the existence 
of man 13,371 years before a.p. 1854; “‘of man, moreover, ina state of 
civilization, so far, at least, as to be able to fashion clay into vessels, and to 
know how to harden them by the action of a strong heat*.” 
Prof. Max Miiller+ has opened out a similar vista into the remote past 
of the history of the human race by the perception and application of 
analogies in the formation of modern and ancient, of living and dead lan- 
guages. 
* Proceedings of the Royal Society, Feb. 11, 1858, vol. ix. p. 128-134. 
+ ‘Oxford Essays,’ 1857, 
