Of home ethnologists, more especially those who have brought to bear linguistic attainments upon man's ancient history, I need not allude to the eminent ones who share with us our present work, but I may be permitted to name Robert Gordon Latham, F.R.S. The noble edition of our classical English Dictionary places the name of its author alongside the imperishable one of Samuel Johnson; but Latham's original works give him a distinct and lasting pedestal of fame as an elucidator of the affinities of human races, and as a guide in the scientific teaching of our language. May we recognize it as a tribute to British contributions to ethnology that London has been honoured this year by the presence of the most distinguished Continental labourers in this field of science? For myself, as an archæologist, I belong to that other species defined by my master in paleontology, the immortal Cuvier, "antiquaire d'une nouvelle espèce; and my habitual researches relate to periods transcending those expressed by the terms of historical estimates of past time. In that relation mainly stand the few studies I have been able to devote to the proper subjects of the present Section, and perhaps the sole service I may render to the Congress is to exemplify hindrances to the progress of geology, which possibly may still tend to divert from its true course the science of Oriental races and families of mankind.

The Papuans of New Guinea, with cognate dark-skinned, broadnosed, prognathic peoples of Australia, New Hebrides, New Caledonia, and neighbouring islands, bespeak by affinities of their rude dialects, as well as by physical characters, a low and early race of mankind, which, in some respects indicating kinship with the Bushmen of South Africa, are yet sufficiently distinct to suggest a long term of existence in another and distant continent. Zoological and geological evidences concur, as in a degree exemplified in Wallace's Malay Archipelago,' to point to a prehistoric race of mankind, existing generation after generation on a continent which, in course of gradual, non-cataclysmal, geological change, has been broken up into insular patches of land: there such race is still open to ethnological study. Wending westward to regain the proper field of our Congress, we have evidences of as early-if I say "primitive" it is because we know none earlier-bipeds, in the trans-Gangetic peninsula and Indonesian Archipelago. These Nigritos, in India, have fled before

invaders from the sub-Himalayan range, represented by Burmese and Siamese; before invaders from the south, the Malays, with their maritime advance in civilization; before later immigrations from the north, with the religion and literature respectively of the Aryan Hindoos and the Arab Mussulmans. Fragments of the dwarf Nigrito stratum may be picked up-a scanty one in Engomho, the largest island off Sumatra, in the Mergui Archipelago, another in the Nicobar Isles, a third in the Andamans. The Nigritos who have survived such changes, and have been caught, so to speak, upon a new continent, as in Hindostan, have preserved themselves in mountain fastnesses and forests, have fled before later immigrants, have never assimilated therewith, have always been looked upon by them as prior in time, and now are verging towards extinction. In speculating, therefore, on the place of origin of Mincopies and Hill-tribes, I would impress upon ethnologists to set aside ideas of the actual or present disposition of land and sea as being necessarily related thereto, and to associate with the beginning of such low forms of humanity a lapse of time in harmony with the latest geological changes of the earth's surface. In such observations (e.g., as the estimable voyager Wallace uses, when he remarks on the high probability that the "Nigritos of Bengal have had an Asiatic rather than a Polynesian origin"-op. cit. vol. ii. p. 424), no facts supporting the assumption of such degree of probability have come to my knowledge. From such as have come, I infer that the birth-land of the Mincopies, e.g., was neither Asiatic nor Polynesian as these terms are understood in modern geography. A contributor to the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Bengal writes:- "Some may be of African origin or of mixed African descent; their woolly hair and other signs apparently afford such a solution" (Mr. Day, F.Z.S., Observations on the Andamanese, June, 1870, p. 153). The question of the African origin I have sounded in my Report on the Psychical and Physical Characters of the Mincopies, in Reports of the British Association, 1861. As to the hypothesis that "the Mincopies and Australians are not a pure race, but hybrids between true negroes and a Malayan or yellow race" (Quatrefages, Unité de l'Espèce Humaine, 12mo., 1861, p. 173), I will only repeat my remark-"the cardinal defect of speculators on the origin of the human species seems to me to be the assumption that the present geographical condition of the earth's

surface preceded or co-existed with the origin of such species (Reports of British Association, 1861, p. 8).

The Andamanese, or Mincopies, of whom I exhibit photographs, suggest the same relation to geological change of surface as the Papuans. Their islands are in the Bay of Bengal, but so much as may be deduced from their poor unsettled language shows relationship with the Môn or Peguan dialects rather than with the continental Burmese living on the coast nearest the Andamans. Sus andamanensis and some "Bats" are the sole known mammals, besides the Mincopies, which may be called indigenous to the islands. A Tupaia is suspected to still exist in the woods; but how many species may have been extirpated by the unceasing chase of hungry Mincopies, Zoology may never know; unless some cavern, with bones and teeth in its breccia or sediments, affords materials to the paleontologist. I infer that the now island homes of the Mincopie race were above water before the nearest continent assumed its present size and shape. The fossils of giraffes and hippopotamuses in Newer Tertiary deposits on slopes high up the Himalayas significantly point to the (geologically) recent elevation of that grand mountain chain, and therewith probably to the movements resulting in the present configuration of the southern Asiatic land.

Notwithstanding their proximity to the mainland and to the course of Indian traffic, the Mincopies maintained themselves until the needs of the Mutiny war led to one of their islands becoming a penal settlement, apart from higher races of mankind. These races had till then failed, as they still fail with the Papuans of New Guinea, to get a footing and begin the work of elevation of the aboriginal race. This arises from the unmitigated, uncompromising hostility, by force and fraud, to any invaders, accidental or intentional, whom the aborigines had it in their power to extirpate. Such hostility, hatred, and dread can only be compared with that which the brute species in a state of nature entertain towards man. An island of Quadrumana would conduct themselves, to the extent of their destructive and repellent faculties, in like fashion towards biped immigrants. The Mincopies, like the Papuans, seem to realize instinctively their fate through contact with a higher race, by which, however benevolent the intention, such fate would be to be improved, like the Tasmanians, off the face of their native land. Our country

men, since the occupancy of one of the islands, have done their utmost to raise and civilize the natives. Young female Mincopies have been taken in hand by kindly-disposed ladies, have been dressed and trained as English girls. Some of the scholars tried to get back to the larger island by swimming. Of those retained to the time of puberty and then returned to their tribe, all threw off their European clothes and reverted to the simple pudendal leaf, and they showed no sense of shame before their teachers. The cincture of the males-three or more girths of a strong flexile tendril wound round the abdomenleaves the generative organs conspicuous, as in the photographs; and of such nakedness they have a prelapsarian, or, speaking zoologically, quadrumanous, unconsciousness. Of ideas of another life they afford glimpses. The widow dreams of her dead husband; to the widower, in his slumber, returns his departed wife: the pangs of hunger and the thoughts of successful chase excite the vision, in which a deceased notable hunter or fisher revisits the dreamer, and an unusual haul of fish or capture of game is the result. This seems to be the foundation of the Mincopies' faith in a future life of successful chase and cessation of hunger pangs. The widow carries about with her till re-married the skull of her deceased spouse. The Australian widow is more practical, and converts his cranium into a drinking vessel. I cannot obtain from friendly residents, through whom I receive materials for studying the Mincopies, any fact or evidence of an "inherent impulse moving them to turn their thoughts and questionings towards the sources of natural phenomena." Such impulse may arise after primeval man has made the requisite advance. But the subjects of Oriental ethnology, represented in the photographs exhibited, stand on a lower step, and even these may be primeval only in the sense that we have not yet got evidence of still inferior bipeds.

There is, of course, another hypothesis which may commend itself to a few of my hearers, as it does to a large proportion of the reading classes of this country. It is that which, in the terms of the Venerable Archdeacon Squire, would affirm that the Andaman Islands, like Egypt, were "colonized about 130 years after the Flood by emigrant Asiatics, descendants of Ham or Cham, the son of Noah." Such hypothesis the Archdeacon rests upon "the Scriptural account of the general destruction of the world by the Deluge, which all

Christians admit, or, at least, ought to admit " (Preface to the Translation of Plutarch "De Iside et Osiride," p. v.). Fain would I have found facts to square with this conscience-enforcing principle, and hard was the struggle against the prepossessions of sacerdotal education in being brought, by the course of daily duty, face to face with phenomena subversive of the idea of the distribution of mankind from the plain of Shinar at the Biblical date of the building of Babel. The evidences of the antiquity of man in Europe, discovered, with a glimpse of their significance, by Tournol and Christol, in 1826; by Schmerling, with more insistence of their meaning, in 1833; rightly discerned and persistently advocated by Boucher de Perthes in 1838; finally confirmed by Prof. Prestwich, of Oxford, have multiplied to demonstration. I will only remark that the shell mounds of the Andaman Islands exemplify the grade and mode of existence of stone-weaponed humanity at this day, identical with that of the accumulators of "kitching middens" in the North of Europe in pre-historic times.

My latest ethnological observations relate to the race that founded the civilization of ancient Egypt. Permit me briefly to premise evidence of the antiquity of the subjects on which those observations were made. The want of this preliminary has vitiated studies akin to my own, and far superior to them in extent and devotion of research. As an example I may refer to the vast body of illustrations of the craniology of mummified Egyptians, with which the honoured name of Morton is associated. The subjects of his conscientious and accurate observations had been gathered in the great graveyards and labyrinthic sepulchres of Egypt, but of their relation to any given reign or dynasty there is little or no evidence-none certainly that can be called trustworthy in regard to the first six dynasties. The skulls figured in Morton's great work are of ancient Egyptians it is true, but of such as may have died at any period of a range over some 4000 years.

My studies are not merely of skulls, but of them clothed with flesh; not of their dead remains only, but I may say of the living men and women contemporary with Kings of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Dynasties. Portrait sculpture had advanced to such perfection at that remote period, that each individual of the upwards. of fifty statues, from the sculpture closets of family tombs, has its