﻿ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. 



Ixxi 



like this is surely enough to satisfy the reasonable scruples of a 

 religious man. But let us, for a moment, suppose that there are 

 some religious difficulties in the conclusions of geology. How then 

 are we to solve them ? Not by making a world after a pattern of 

 our own, not by shifting and shuffling the solid strata of the earth, 

 and then dealing them out in such a way as to play the game of an 

 ignorant hypothesis ; not by shutting our eyes to facts, or denying 

 the evidence of our senses, but by patient investigation, carried on 

 in the sincere love of truth, and by learning to reject every conse- 

 quence not warranted by direct physical evidence. Pursued in this 

 spirit, geology can neither lead to any false conclusions, nor offend 

 against any religious truth." 



Appendix to Mr. Horner's Anniversary Address. 



In stating the evidence for the early existence of the Human Eace, 

 I give a passage from an essay by Dr. Williams, to sbow that modern 

 discoveries in ethnology and philology afford cumulating proofs of 

 the very remote antiquity of man. When that paragraph was printed 

 I had not seen an unpublished memoir, entitled ' On the Antiquity 

 of Man, from the evidence of Language,' by John Crawford, Esq., 

 F.R.S., President of the Ethnological Society, and author of ' The 

 Grammar and Dictionary of the Malay Language,' published in 

 1852. From that memoir I quote, with the permission of the author, 

 the following passages : — ■ 



" The periods usually assigned for Man's first appearance on earth 

 necessarily date only from the time when he bad already attained 

 such an amount of civilization as to enable him to frame some kind 

 of record of his own career, and take no account of the many ages 

 which must have transpired before he could have attained that 

 power. Among the many facts which attest the high antiquity of 

 Man, the formation of language may be adduced, and in the course 

 of this short paper, I shall endeavour to bring forward a few of the 

 most striking facts which it yields. 



" Language is not innate, but adventitious — a mere acquirement, 

 having its origin in the superiority of the human understanding, like 

 any other acquisition derived from the same source. The evidence 

 that such is the case is abundant. Infants are without language, 

 and we see them slowly and gradually attaining it, in proportion as 

 the brain acquires maturity. Children acquire with equal facility 

 any language whatsoever; they can forget the first acquired lan- 

 guage, and learn another. 



" Among the unquestionable proofs that language is not innate, 

 is the prodigious number of languages which exists, — some with a 

 very narrow range of articulate sounds, others with a very wide one ; 

 some with words confined to single syllables, and others having 

 many; some being of very simple, and others of a very complex 

 structure. Such a state of things necessarily implies that each 

 tongue was a separate and distinct creation, or that each horde 

 framed its own independent tongue. 



" If additional confirmation of the fact that language is an adven- 



