THE PRESIDENTS ADDRESS. 
193 
finally four feet, on two of which he goes, and uses the other two 
for prehensive purposes ; and indeed to speak the truth, as a natural 
historian according to the principles of Science, up to the present 
time I have not been able to discover any character by which man 
can be distinguished from the ape ; for there are somewhere apes 
who are less hairy than men, erect in position, going just like him 
on two feet, and recalling the human species by the use they make 
of their hands and feet to such an extent, that the less educated 
travellers have given them out as a kind of man. Speech indeed 
seems to distinguish man from other animals, but after all this is 
only a sort of power or result, and not a characteristic mark taken 
from number, figure, proportion, or position, so that it is a matter 
of the most arduous investigation to describe the exact specific 
difference of man. But there is something in us, which cannot be 
seen, whence our knowledge of ourselves depends — that is, reason, 
the most noble thing of all, in which man excels to a most sur- 
prising extent all other animals." * 
And to this opinion the great naturalist adhered up to the time 
of the close of his long and well-spent life. 
Buff on had been working on the same lines as Linnaeus, and had 
come to pretty nearly the same conclusions, and shortly before the 
publication of the Systema had issued his two volumes, and Dau- 
benton, Blumenbach and Soemmering, Camper and White, followed 
with memoirs upon a subject which was then interesting many, 
and which thenceforth was to become a study of the highest im- 
portance. Then came the reports of the great travellers, Byron, La 
Yaillant, Bruce, Cook, Barrow, La Perouse, Pallas, and others ; and 
the struggle between the so-called classical and philosophical 
schools, the former headed by Cuvier, the latter by Lamarck and 
Etienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire, followed — a struggle which has con- 
tinued ever since, and I need not say is not yet settled to every 
one's satisfaction. Those interested in Ethnology banded them, 
selves together, and a society was constituted in the first year of 
this century, in Paris, under the title of the Society of Observers 
of Man, which did not last, in those stormy times, very long. The 
Ethnological Societies of London and Paris followed, but the scope 
of their operations was limited, and Anthropology as a distinct 
* See "The History of Anthropology," by T. Bendyshe. Memoirs 
Anthropological Society, vol. i., to which article I am much indebted. 
VOL. VII. N 
