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Address of A. R. Wallace at the Glasgow Meeting. 375 
the highest development of the human intellect. Yet this is 
really what we have seen in the last sixteen years. Formerly 
difficulties were exaggerated, and it was asserted that we had 
not sufficient knowledge to venture on any generalizations on 
the subject. Now difficulties are set aside, and it is held that 
our theories are so well established and so far-reaching, that 
they explain and comprehend all nature. It is not long ago (as 
Thave already reminded you) since facts were contemptuously 
ignored, because they favored our now popular views; at the 
present day it seems to me that facts which oppose them hardly 
receive due consideration. And as opposition to the best in- 
centive to progress, and it is not well even for the best theories 
to have it all their own way, I propose to direct your attention 
toa few such facts, and to the conclusion that seems fairly 
deducible from them. 
_ It is a curious circumstance, that notwithstanding the atten- 
tion that has been directed to the subject in every part of the 
world, and the numerous excavations connected with railways 
and mines which have offered such facilities for geological dis- 
covery, no advance whatever has been made for a considerable 
number of years, in detecting the time or the mode o ; 
with the lower animals has yet appeared. 
_ Itis, indeed, well known that negative evidence in geology 
18 of very slender value, and this is, no doubt, generally the 
case, rhe circumstances here are, however, peculiar, for many 
Converging lines of evidence show that on the theory of devel- 
opment by the same laws which have determined the develop- 
ment of the lower animals, man must be immensely older than 
any traces of him yet discovered. As this is a point of great 
interest we must devote a few moments to its consideration. 
“ye e most important difference between man and such of 
the lower animals as most nearly approach him, is undoubtedly 
in the bulk h 
form capacity of the cranium. We should therefore antic- 
marks of degradation. ‘The former does not present so low a 
ao as that of most existing savages, but is—to use the words 
ha tol, Huxley—“a fair average human skull, which might 
ve belonged to a philosopher, or might have contained the 
