162 Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. [Sess. 
Honorary and Corresponding Memberships flowed in on him from various 
learned bodies in other countries. He delighted to attend archaeological 
and scientific congresses, largely because it gave him a colourable excuse 
for the travel which he so thoroughly enjoyed. His experiences in Bosnia, 
Herzegovina, and Dalmatia are recorded in a volume which has gone 
through more than one edition. But his most comprehensive tour was 
undertaken in 1897, when he and his wife went to Toronto to attend the 
British Association meeting, and made the return journey by Japan, China, 
India, and the Mediterranean. 
In 1892 he played a prominent part in rousing public interest in the 
newly discovered lake- village at Glastonbury. Next year he was President 
of the Anthropological Section of the British Association. By this time 
he had pushed his researches back from the lake-dwellers to the makers 
of palaeolithic implements, and he chose for the subject of his Presidential 
address “ The relation between the Erect Posture and the Physical and 
Intellectual Development of Man,” maintaining the view that “ man’s mental 
superiority over all other animals was primarily due to his attainment of 
the erect attitude which, by entirely eliminating the fore-limbs from 
participating in the function of locomotion, enabled him to utilise these 
limbs exclusively for prehensile and mechanical purposes.” The theory 
attracted widespread attention, and the address, which was afterwards 
published, was always regarded by its author as one of his most important 
contributions to anthropology. Such criticism as it received, he welcomed. 
Nothing pleased him better than intelligent discussion. Even controversy 
had a certain attraction for him : witness the zest with which he used to 
recall the main incidents of the dispute about the great “ Clyde Mystery ” 
long after time had justified the attitude he himself had so consistently 
adopted. So, too, he thoroughly enjoyed being summoned to give evidence 
before Lord- Justice Far well in a lawsuit over certain Irish gold ornaments, 
when the point regarding which he had to testify was the date of the last 
upheaval of the land that formed the raised beaches along the shores of 
the North of Ireland and Scotland. This was in 1903. 
The same year was marked by an incident that indicated an impending 
change in his way of life. He purchased a house at Largs. He was now 
sixty-eight, and he was beginning to feel that the bustle of foreign travel 
was something of a strain. He hoped to find in the quieter pursuits of a 
country environment a more restful form of the variety that he loved. At 
first his new home was a summer residence only. But he gradually became 
more and more attached to his garden at Elmbank. The death of his wife 
in 1907 was a very heavy blow. Thereafter Edinburgh saw him only at 
