MEETINGS OF SOCIETIES 22 7 



MEETINGS OF SOCIETIES. 



WELLINGTON PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY. 



Wellington, 17th June, 1891.— Edward Tregear, Esq., F.R.G.S., 

 President, in the chair. 



New Member. — H. Farquhar. 



A copy of Volame XXIIT. of the Transactions of the New Zealand 

 Institute was laid on the table ; also proof sheets and specimen plates of 

 Mr. Hudson's work on the Entomology of New Zealand. The plates 

 were considered very beautiful. 



The President then delivered an address, of which the following is 

 an abstract. — Mr. Tregear commenced by congratulating Sir James 

 Hector on receiving the founder's medal of the Royal Geographical 

 Society. He then referred to the lecent discovery of the bones cf the 

 Dinornis in Queensland and remarked that soundings recently taken 

 showed solid land once to have existed from New Zealand to Australia 

 and through the Malay Archipelago to Asia; whether the moa had been 

 evolved from the emu by gradual transformation or the emu from the 

 the moa would be for the geologists and naturalists to discuss. The 

 addiess then referred to the theories as to man's origin, whether from 

 a single pair or from many sources ; described the primitive state of the 

 human race, with the progress upward from the cave-dwellers to the 

 pastoral peoples, then to cultivatoi'S of the soil, then to dwellers in 

 cities. Referring to the question of marriage, the paper described the 

 emergence of the communal form into the slave period and thus to the 

 belief in the wife being private property of the husband. The speaker 

 called attention to the agreement between anthropology and the other 

 sciences as to the great lapse of time necessary for mankind to have 

 existed, and to have passed through the palaeolithic and neolithic periods 

 to the building of great cities, which we now know to have been in 

 existence 6,000 years ago. Great portions of Asia and Africa, fertile 

 and abounding in all descriptions of animal and vegetable life were still 

 unsettled. Many extracts from the reports of travellers just returned 

 from the wilds were read, showing the adaptability of those places to 

 the uses of the emigrant. But the speaker did not believe that the 

 colonization of Africa and other places in the possession of native races 

 was as practicable as was generally believed. The enormous fecundity 

 of the dark races, if relieved of the checks caused by bloodshed and war, 

 would inevitably squeeze out the incomers and prevent men of high 

 organisation existing in force sufficient to control the lower and more 

 persistent racial types. Mr. Tregear concluded by expressing his 

 opinion that the future of the world was not so entirely in the hands 

 of intellectual nations as he had once thought, but that if the advance 

 of mankind was threatened by the overflow of barbaric peoples, he 

 trusted that the time of submersion would be short, and the world soon 

 restime its path of progress refreshed and invigorated with new and 

 stronger life. 



