" LECTURE I. 



as regards tlie physical and mental condition of tlie people to 

 wliicli the exhumed belonged, than ten authors of antiquity 

 who may have described that people. It is only by degrees 

 that we have been led to search for a proper basis on which to 

 found the science of man. 



The object which I have proposed to myself in these lectures 

 is, to make you acquainted with the latest results obtained 

 from the study of the natural history of man, with his relation to 

 other animals, his antiquity upon the globe, and the primitive 

 state of the human species. Many of these questions I have 

 already aphoristically touched upon in a polemical treatise, 

 published some years ago. If this treatise had no other merit, 

 it at any rate opened questions which are intentionally passed 

 over in silence, or made party questions. As is well known, 

 an Athenian legislator imposed a fine on any citizen who did 

 not profess to belong to some pohtical party. Similarly there 

 occur periods in the history of science, when public opinion 

 forces the inquirer to espouse a party, and neglect is followed 

 by punishment. For inquiry per se, yielding neither results 

 nor increase of the knowledge of mankind, seems to me as 

 little meritorious as the digging of a hypochondriac which has 

 for its sole object to equalise the circulation of his blood. It 

 is only when digging the soil leads to the production of fruit, 

 that it becomes meritorious. 



The questions I intend to discuss offer peculiar difficulties, 

 to which I must draw your attention, lest from the paucity of 

 the results you should hastily draw the conclusion that insuf- 

 ficient pains have been taken to elucidate certain points. The 

 study of the natural history of man, like a giant with a thousand 

 arms, embraces almost every branch of human knowledge, and 

 the deeper we penetrate, the more intricate appear the paths 

 which may lead to the goal. The subject is not man, con- 

 sidered as an abstract being : the inquiiy extends to millions 

 of men scattered over the earth, their physical peculiarities, 

 their present and former relations to each other, and stretches 

 back to a time when man scarcely left more traces of his ex- 

 istence than the savage beast which inhabited the same region. 

 From the results obtained we must, then, draw inferences con- 



