THE PRESIDENTS ADDRESS. LT? 
ours, than it is the omen of the labours which it compels us to under- 
go. With the intellect of angels, and the bodies of earth-worms, we 
have the power to conquer and the need to do it.’’* 
Viewing man thus exercising dominion over the inferior creation by 
no preeminence of physical power, but solely by intellectual supre- 
macy, we can no more conceive of the development of the brute into - 
man,—dowered with reason, capable of intelligent faith, the heir of 
immortality,—than we can conceive of the conversion of inorganic 
matter into the very lowest forms of organic life, without the inter- 
vention of creative Omnipotence. 
Nevertheless truth is ever the gainer by the collision of opinions, 
and the most important results may be anticipated in reference to the 
Science of Ethnology, from the revision of the whole question as to 
the origin and nature of species, consequent on the discussion to which 
the theories of Darwin have given rise. The increasing proneness 
towards the unlimited multiplication of species has unquestionably 
tended to the cumbrance instead of the elucidation of every depart- 
ment of zoology ; and the minute subdivisions which naturalists have 
latterly favoured, have given an undue force not only to such general 
arguments as those of Darwin in relation to organic life, but to the 
theories of modern ethnologists by which the genus -homo has been 
divided into an ever growing multiplicity of species. If we take the 
typical man of each of Blumenbach’s comparatively simple divisions, 
we cannot evade the conclusion that very clearly defined elements of 
diversity furnish grounds for the classification into Caucasian, Ethiop- 
ian, Mongolian, Malayan, and American. But the simplicity of this 
system has secured for it no permanent adoption. Pickering, the 
able ethnologist of the United States exploring expedition, after 
examining, as he believes, every variety of the human race, rejects the 
idea that the American Red Man is distinct from the Asiatic Mongo- 
lian, and yet redivides the human family into eleven essentially distinct 
races, or species. ‘There is” he adds, “no middle ground between 
the admission of eleven distinct species in the human family, and the 
reduction to one.”? But other ethnologists, while pursuing the same 
course, have manifested even less favour for any middle ground. 
Borey de St. Vincent divides mankind into fifteen species; Broe 
greatly enlarges this by numerous sub-genera; and Gliddon and Nott, 
* What is Technology ?—An Inaugural Lecture. By George Wilson, M.D., F.R.S.E. 
Regius Professor of Technology, Edinburgh University. 
Vou VI. I 
