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, and 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 
