134 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES 
summer of 1932 he actually traversed a route from eastern China, through 
northern India, to Syria and the western coast. Dr. Black, unfortunately, 
did not live to see the realisation of his project, but we are glad to learn 
that Father P. Teilhard de Chardin will take his place in researches 
beginning in India this autumn. 
It is very interesting to notice that if central Asia was actually the 
region in which the human family originated, the few known fragments 
of the oldest fossil men are distributed geographically just as a palzonto- 
logist would expect them to be. The late Dr. W. D. Matthew pointed 
out that if each race of animals evolved at a single centre, a succession 
of waves of increasingly advanced genera must have radiated outwards 
from that centre. The latest and highest types would be found at the 
actual place of evolution, and they would be surrounded by rings of less 
advanced types of lower and lower degree until the lowest would occur 
at the outer limit. 
The fragments of the oldest fossil men hitherto discovered are indeed 
very few, but although allowance for negative evidence may cause some 
hesitation, it is at least noteworthy that they are all on the periphery of 
the Euro-Asiatic continental area. LEoanthropus and Heidelberg man 
were found on the western margin of Europe, Pithecanthropus at the 
southern margin of Asia, and Sinanthropus close to the eastern coast 
of Asia. If human types were evolving near central Asia, the places 
of these actual discoveries are in a distant partial ring round the 
source. 
It is, of course, impossible to be sure that all the primitive men just 
mentioned were living at approximately the same geological period. They 
date back to a time evidently before burials, and three of them were found 
in river deposits, while the fourth was met with under peculiar conditions 
in a cave. If, however, the geological and paleontological arguments 
for their correlation be considered, I think it will be agreed that they 
must have been nearly contemporaneous. The geological age of Eoanth- 
ropus from Piltdown, Sussex, is perhaps the most difficult to determine, 
because it was found in a flood-deposit which contains mammalian 
remains and flint implements of more than one stage at the end of the 
Pliocene and beginning of the Pleistocene periods. Attempts have been 
made to sort the fossils according to their colour ; but the varied staining 
has no special significance, owing to the irregular distribution of the 
different ferruginous materials in which they were buried. The colour of 
the first pieces of the skull of Eoanthropus itself, indeed, were altered by 
Dawson, who dipped them in bichromate of potash with the intention of 
hardening them. 
Notwithstanding the difficulty of interpreting the discoveries at Pilt- 
down, I think there is no doubt that the skull of Eoanthropus is of the same 
age as the river gravel itself. It is not waterworn, and the brain-case, 
the delicate fragments of the face, the half of the lower jaw, and the canine 
tooth were lying separately in four different places, all close together. 
If these remains had been transported far, and especially if they had been 
washed out of an earlier deposit, they would not have been associated in 
