a half centuries farther into antiquity, when its condition was the same as at present: 'They that inhabit the British promontory of Belerium' [the Land's End], 'by reason of their converse with merchants, are more civilised and courteous to strangers than the rest are. These are the people that make the tin, which, with a great deal of care and labour, they dig out of the ground, and that being rocky, the metal is mixed with some grains of earth, out of which they melt the metal, and then refine it; then they cut it into square pieces like a die, and carry it to a British island near at hand called Iktis; for at low tides, all being dry between them and the island, they convey over in carts an abundance of tin in the meantime. There is one thing peculiar to those islands which lie between Britain and Europe, for at full sea they appear to be islands, but at low water, for a long way, they look like so many peninsulas. Hence the merchants transport the tin they buy of the inhabitants to Gaul; and for thirty days' journey they carry it on packs on horses' backs through Gaul to the mouth of the river Rhone.' *

From this passage it may be inferred that the description was from one who had visited the locality; that the Iktis was near the Land's End; that no place in the district afforded superior accommodation and shelter for maritime trade; that it was adjacent to the tin country; and that it was the only commercial station in Britain, or that all others were comparatively recent. On the other hand, the Mount answers admirably in every respect to the description; it is in the midst of the most productive tin mines of Cornwall; and besides it there is no island which can be supposed to be that described by the historian. It is accordingly held by all who have given careful attention to the question, that the Iktis and St Michael's Mount are one and the same semi-island; and that nineteen centuries have failed to produce any change in its condition.

We may, perhaps, with advantage recapitulate at this point the various positions we have established respecting the Antiquity of man in Devonshire. Since the era of that tranquil, uniform, and general subsidence which resulted in the submergence of the forests whose remains are found on the strands of all the British seas and channels, thick accumulations have been lodged on the forest ground, and broad foreshores have been cut; and yet nineteen centuries have failed to produce an appreciable change in the character of St Michael's Mount, or in its relation to the mainland. Prior to this subsidence, was the growth of the forests, which afforded food and shelter to the mammoth and his contemporaries; before this, again, was the period of the deposition of the blue clay and the 'tin ground,' in which the forests subsequently grew; earlier still was the epoch of the excavation of the valleys, in whose bounding hills the caverns of South Devon are situated; at a still more remote period,

* Book v. chap 22.

when the bottoms of the valleys were at least one hundred feet above their present levels, the characteristic red loam was carried into the caverns, in some cases, as at Brixham, by the action of persistent streams, and in others, as in Kent's Hole, by the fitful agency of land-floods; still farther back was the period of the old crystalline stalagmitic cavern floor, sometimes twelve feet thick; and in a still more hoary antiquity, the breccia had been carried into the same cavern. Great as is the age of this breccia, it does not exceed the antiquity of man in the south-west of England.

The cave-men of Devonshire were the contemporaries of many species of animals, once widely spread over the world, but which had become extinct before the era of the Scotch fir in Denmark; a tree which is not only incapable of growing now in that part of Europe, but had been superseded there by the oak, which, in its turn, and upwards of two thousand years ago, was itself supplanted by the beech-prior to the date of the earliest Kitchen-middens of the same country-much earlier than the erection of Stonehenge, Abury, and the other megalithic monuments, as well as the tumuli of Western Europe, whose age is wrapped in an obscurity so dense as to have been the theme of much and long-continued speculation and many hypotheses-and far anterior to the earliest of the Pfahlbauten recently discovered in the Swiss lakes. The ancient cavemammals, whose extinction was due neither to man nor to sudden convulsion, and was probably spread over a great breadth of time, betoken a climate colder than that which at present obtains. Those earliest known men of Devon were ignorant of the use of metals; and though the tools they made of flint were sometimes elaborately chipped into shape, they were invariably left unpolished. In addition to these, they formed awls and fish-spears of bone, the latter being skilfully and even elegantly executed. They wore clothing, which they sometimes stitched together, using for that purpose carefully made bone needles; and occasionally they fastened their dresses with stout bone pins. They kindled fires and cooked their food; but as no engravings, sculptures, or other indications of art have yet been found, they must be regarded, perhaps, as inferior to their French contemporaries. To what race they belonged, is unknown; nor is there anything to shew whether or not they were the degraded descendants of superior ancestors. Those who hold that they were, are, of course, prepared to admit that there were men more ancient still than those old cave-dwellers; and they may be called on to account for the fact, that whilst superior and older men would have left a greater number and variety of tools in older deposits, nothing of the kind has yet been met with anywhere. Be this as it may, it is at least eminently probable that the cradle of the human race was not in a climate so ungenial as ours; and that, therefore, the earliest men of Devonshire, though they take us into a very remote antiquity, stop far short of the first appearance of man upon the earth.

31

མvཙ vav་པས ཎྜུལལ པ

existence, man, in his physical, racial, geological, and psychological been studied by hosts of able and industrious inquirers. All that the has done in establishing a special section of Anthropological Science la

Although for several reasons we have confined ourselves chiefly to the caverns of Devonshire, they are by no means the only deposi tories of this kind of proof of the antiquity of man on the globe. We have already noticed briefly the interesting discoveries made in the caverns of the Dordogne in the south of France; and the following quotation from Dr J. H. Bennet's Winter in the South of Europe, shews that similar testimony has been found in caves near Mentone, on the border of the Mediterranean.

'On the shore (near Mentone), at the eastern extremity of the inner bay, in the "red rocks," as they are called, are several goodsized caves, which contain in great abundance organic remains-the bones of large and small mammifers-imbedded in hard sand and calcareous matter. The organic remains thus imbedded cover the floor to a depth of many feet, and are mixed with the flint weapons and utensils and knives, which have excited so much attention during the last few years; testifying as they do to the existence of races of savage men in far back pre-Adamite times.

'The existence of flint weapons among the bones found in the Mentone caverns was first noticed, I believe, in 1858, by M. Forel, a Swiss geologist. He published, in 1860, a memoir, in which he gives the result of his researches. M. Forel's investigations were principally made in the third and fourth caves, counting from Mentone. He found a great quantity of broken bones, shells, remains of crustacea, and pieces of charcoal. Along with these he discovered many fragments, splinters of flint, and also many arrow and lance heads, spear points, and triangular pieces of flint, evidently intended for knives. The bones belonged to stags, sheep, boars, horses, wolves, dogs, cats, rabbits, a large carnivorous animal, and one to the Bos primigenius, a large bull which belongs to the glacial period.

'During the winter of 1862, Mr Moggridge continued these researches, with great care, in the second cavern, and among great masses of bones also found the flint instruments above enumerated, some of them in a perfect state. Pieces of charcoal were likewise found mixed with them.'

Notice sur les Instruments en Silex et les Ossements trouvés dans les Cavernes d Menton. Moyes. 1860.

The illustration of the entrance to Kent's Cavern, given on the first page, is taken from a beautiful photograph by Mr F. Bedford, Torquay.

ADDRESS

TO THE

ANTHROPOLOGICAL SECTION

OF THE

BRITISH ASSOCIATION,

BY

PROFESSOR SIR WILLIAM TURNER, M.B., LL.D., D.C.L.,
F.R.SS.L. & E.

PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION.

15

On Heredity.

TWENTY-SIX years have passed by since the British Association for the Advancement of Science last assembled in this city. Many of the incidents of that meeting are still fresh in my memory, the more vividly, perhaps, because it was the first meeting of the Association that I had attended. The weather, so important a factor in most of our functions, was dry and bright. The visitor, instead of being enshrouded in that canopy of mist and smoke which so often meets the traveller as he approaches your city, was greeted with light and sunshine. The cordial welcome and reception so freely granted by the community, and more especially the princely yet gracious hospitality exercised by the President, your eminent townsman, now Lord Armstrong, are all deeply imprinted on my memory. But, apart from these attractions, which added so much to the amenities of the occasion, the meeting was one of deep interest to all those Members and Associates who were engaged in biological study.

Lyell's famous book on the Antiquity of Man' had been published shortly before. The essays on the Origin of Species' by natural selection, by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, had appeared only five years earlier in the Journal of the Linnæan Society, and in 1859 Darwin's treatise on the Origin of Species,' in which its illustrious author summarised the facts he had collected and the conclusions at which he had arrived, had been published. Although no President of the British Association had up to that time given his adhesion to the new theory, yet it was clear that men were beginning to see, in many instances perhaps only dimly, how the theory of evolution by natural selection was destined to work a remarkable change, amounting almost to a revolution, in our conceptions of biological questions generally, and their applicability to the study of man.

At that time Anthropology had not assumed so definite a position in the work of the Association as it now possesses. Neither a department, nor a section, was devoted to it, and the subjects which it embraces were scattered abroad, either in the department of Anatomy and Physiology, in the section of Geography and Ethnology, in that of Geology, or in that of Statistics. It is true that a vigorous attempt was made about that time to give it a more independent position, but it was not until the Association met in Nottingham, in 1866, that it was assigned a definite department, and at the Montreal meeting, in 1884, Anthropology assumed the dignity of a section.

But although the youngest section of the Association, the Science of Man is not the youngest of the sciences. Long before the British Association came into existence, man, in his physical, racial, geological, and psychological aspects, had been studied by hosts of able and industrious inquirers. All that the Association has done in establishing a special section of Anthropological Science has been to 1889. H

bring together, as it were, into a single focus all those workers who apply themselves to the study of man in his various aspects.

As presiding over the proceedings of the Section on this occasion, it is a part of my duty to open its public business with an address. For me, as doubtless for many of those who have preceded me in this honourable office, one's mind has been somewhat exercised in the choice of a subject. In a branch of biological science so vast as Anthropology, in which the room for selection is so ample, the difficulty of making a choice is perhaps still further increased. As a professional anatomist, whose life's work it has been to study the structure of the human body in its normal aspects, to inquire into the variations which it exhibits in different individuals, and to compare its structure with that of various forms of animal life, it at first occurred to me that an address on the physical characteristics of some of the races of men would be appropriate. But further consideration led me to think that such a subject would be too technical for a general audience, and that it might perhaps be productive of greater interest on the part of my auditors if I selected a topic which, whilst strictly scientific in all its bearings, yet appeals more distinctly to the popular mind, and is now attracting attention. Hence I have chosen the subject of Heredity, by which I mean that special property through which the peculiarities of an organism are transmitted to its descendants throughout successive generations, so that the offspring, in their main features, resemble their parents. The subject of Heredity, if I may say so, is in the air at the present time. The journals and magazines, both scientific and literary, are continually discussing it, and valuable treatises on the subject are appearing at frequent intervals. But though so important a topic of existing scientific thought and speculation, it is by no means a new subject, and certain of its aspects were under discussion so far back as the time of Aristotle. The prominence which it has assumed of late years is in connection with its bearing on the Darwinian Theory of Natural Selection, and, consequently, biologists generally have had their attention directed to it. But in its relations to Man, his structure, functions, and diseases, it has long occupied a prominent position in the minds of anatomists, physiologists, and physicians. That certain diseases, for example, are hereditary was recognised by Hippocrates, who stated generally that hereditary diseases are difficult to remove, and the influence which the hereditary transmission of disease exercises upon the duration of life is the subject of a chapter in numerous works on practical medicine, and forms an important element in the valuation of lives for life insurance.

The first aspect of the question which has to be determined is whether any physical basis can be found for Heredity. Is there any evidence that the two parents contribute each a portion of its substance to the production of the offspring so that a physical continuity is established between successive generations? The careful study, especially during the last few years, of the development of a number of species of animals mostly but not exclusively amongst the Invertebrata, by various observers, of whom I may especially name Bütschli, Fol, E. Van Beneden, and Hertwig, has established the important fact that the young animal arises by the fusion within the egg or germ-cell of an extremely minute particle derived from the male parent with an almost equally minute particle derived from the germcell produced by the female parent. These particles are technically termed in the former case the male pronucleus, in the latter the female pronucleus, and the body formed by their fusion is called the segmentation nucleus. These nuclei are so small that it seems almost a contradiction in terms to speak of their magnitude; rather one might say their minimitude, for it requires the higher powers of the best microscopes to see them and follow out the process of conjugation. But notwithstanding their extreme minuteness, the pronuclei and the segmentation nucleus are complex both in chemical and molecular structure. From the segmentation nucleus produced by the fusion of the pronuclei with each other, and from corresponding changes which occur in the protoplasm of the egg which surrounds it, other cells arise by a process of division, and these in their turn also multiply by division. These cells arrange themselves in course of time into layers which are termed the germinal or embryonic layers. From these layers arise all