PROGRESS AND POSITION OF ANTHROPOLOGIC A.L SCIENCES. 627 



conservative. In the excellent address which Prof. Boyd Dawkins 

 delivered to the Royal Archaeological Institute at the Dorchester meet- 

 ing last year, on the present phase of prehistoric archaeology, he con- 

 trasted the few primitive arts, such as sewing, and the manufacture of 

 personal ornaments and rude implements of the chase, possessed by the 

 paleolithic hunters — apart from their great proficiency in the delinea- 

 tion of animals — with the variety of arts, such as husbandry, garden- 

 ing, spinning, weaving, carpentry, boat building, mining, and pottery 

 making, possessed by the neolithic herdsmen, and held that between 

 the two there is a great gulf fixed. Somewhere the gulf must be 

 bridged over. Prof. Boyd Dawkins says that the bridge is not to be 

 found in the caverns of the south of Prance. It is difficult to meet his 

 argument that the presence of grains of barley and stones of the culti- 

 vated plum at Mas d'Azil are evidences of neolithic civilization. His 

 objections to other discoveries are not so strong as this, but are strong 

 enough to make us pause. The tall, long-headed people whose remains 

 were found at Cro-Magnon, he holds to be early neolithic and not pale- 

 olithic, to stand on the near side and not on the far side of the great 

 gulf. 



These considerations lend importance to the discoveries which have 

 been laid before this association at previous meetings by Mr. Seton- 

 Kerr, and which have also been commented upon by Prof. Flinders 

 Petrie and Sir John Evans. If we are compelled to admit a breach of 

 continuity in Europe, is it in Africa that we shall find the missing 

 links"? That is another of the great problems yet unsolved. The 

 evidence we want relates to events which took place at so great a 

 distance of time that we may well wait patiently for it, assured that 

 somewhere or other these missing links in the chain of continuity must 

 have existed and probably are still to be found. 



The next stage, which comprises the interval between the neolithic 

 and the historic periods, was so ably dealt with by Mr. Arthur J. Evans 

 in his address to this section at the Liverpool meeting that it does not 

 call for any observations from me. Two committees appointed by the 

 association in connection with this section touch upon this interval — 

 the committee for investigating the lake dwellings at Glastonbury, and 

 the committee for cooperating with the explorers of Silchester in their 

 well-conducted and fruitful investigation of the influence of Roman 

 civilization on a poor provincial population. I pass on to consider the 

 very great progress that has been made of late years in some of the 

 branches of anthropology other than physical and prehistoric, and 

 especially in that of folklore. I do this the more readily because I do 

 not recollect that folklore has ever before been prominently referred 

 to in an address to this section. It is beginning to assert itself here, 

 and will in time acquire the conspicuous position to which it is becoming 

 entitled, for the British Association is sensitive to every scientific 

 movement and responds readily to the demands of a novel investiga- 



