President's Address. 



325 



Lis higher antiquity, if zoologists can show that any varia- 

 tion, past or existing, is so great as to entitle it to be ranked 

 as a specific distinction- Man may be the sole species of a 

 single genus, but in this particular zoologists have departed 

 from the true Baconian method, and dealt with man as if 

 he did not belong to the same category of vitality with 

 which it is the duty of their science to deal ; and not till 

 they have learned to treat him from a natural-history point 

 of view, can we hope to receive from them anything like 

 truly philosophical opinion. 



As the matter stands at present, we have evidence of 

 man's occupancy in Europe during the formation of the 

 earlier Post-tertiaries, and during the period when the rein- 

 deer, musk-ox, hairy elephant, and woolly rhinoceros roamed 

 over its surface. The existence of these animals in Western 

 Europe betokens a somewhat boreal climate, and in all 

 likelihood man gradually took possession of the continent 

 as the climate began to improve on the gradual recession of 

 the glacial epoch. Arranging the Post-tertiary system, as 

 has been proposed, into Mammothian, Reindeer, and Bovine 

 stages, we find man occurring at least during a portion of 

 the Mammothian stage, and thus bespeaking for him a vast 

 and venerable antiquity — unexpressed in years, no doubt, 

 but not on that account the less certain in its existence and 

 duration. But while man's place in the geological record 

 belongs to the earlier Post-tertiaries in Europe, older varie- 

 ties of his race may have existed for untold ages in the 

 regions of Asia and Africa, from which in all likelihood the 

 European branches were descended * On the advent of the 



* " It is not under the hard conditions of the glacial epoch in Europe," 

 says Dr Falconer, " that the earliest relics of the human race upon the globe 

 are to be sought. Like the Esquimaux, Tehukche, aud Samoyeds on the 

 shores of the Icy Sea at the present day, man must have been then and there 

 an emigrant placed under circumstances of rigorous and uncertain existence, 

 unfavourable to the struggle of life and to the maintenance and spread of the 

 species. It is rather in the great alluvial valleys of tropical or sub-tropical 

 rivers, like the Ganges, the Irrawaddy, and the Nile, where we may expect 

 to detect the vestiges of his earliest abode. It is there where the necessaries 

 of life are produced by nature in the greatest variety and profusion, and 

 obtained with the smallest effort — there where climate exacts the least pro- 

 tection against the vicissitudes of the weather — and there where the lower 



