424 
TROPICAL NATURE 
VII 
to distinct and higher agencies than such as have affected 
their development. 
Antiquity of Intellectual Man 
There is yet another line of inquiry bearing upon this 
subject to 'which I wish to call your attention. It is a some- 
what curious fact that, while all modern writers admit the 
great antiquity of man, most of them maintain the very 
recent development of his intellect, and will hardly con- 
template the possibility of men equal in mental capacity to 
ourselves having existed in prehistoric times. This question 
is generally assumed to be settled by such relics as have been 
preserved of the manufactures of the older races, showing 
a lower and lower state of the arts; by the successive 
disappearance in early times of iron, bronze, and pottery; 
and by the ruder forms of the older flint implements. The 
weakness of this argument has been well shown by Mr. 
Albert Mott in his very original but little-known presidential 
address to the Literary and Philosophical Society of Liver- 
pool in 1873. He maintains that “ our most distant glimpses 
of the past are still of a world peopled as now with men both 
civilised and savage,” and “ that we have often entirely mis- 
read the past by supposing that the outward signs of civilisa- 
tion must always be the same, and must be such as are found 
among ourselves.” In support of this view he adduces a 
variety of striking facts and ingenious arguments, a few of 
which I will briefly summarise. 
Sculptures on Easter Island 
On one of the most remote islands of the Pacific — Easter 
island — 2000 miles from South America, 2000 from the 
Marquesas, and more than 1000 from the Gambier islands, 
are found hundreds of gigantic stone images, now mostly in 
ruins. They are often forty feet high, while some seem to 
have been much larger, the crowns on their heads, cut out of 
a red stone, being sometimes ten feet in diameter, while even 
the head and neck of one is said to have been twenty feet 
high. 1 These images once all stood erect on extensive stone 
platforms. 
1 Jov/rn. of Roy. Geog. Soc ., 1870, pp. 177, 178. 
