Address to the Ethnological and Anthropological Department of the Section of Biology at the Liverpool Meeting, 1870 / by John Evans.

  • Evans, John, 1823-1908.
Date:
[1870]
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Address to the Ethnological and Anthropological Department of the Section of Biology at the Liverpool Meeting, 1870 / by John Evans. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    ADDRESS TO THE iTfHNOLOGICAL AND ANTHROPOLOGI OF THE SECTION OF BIOLOGY AT THE LIVERPOOL MEETING, 1870. BY JOHN EVANS, F.R.S., E.S.A., HONORARY SECRETARY OF THE GEOLOGICAL AND NUMISMATIC SOCIETIES*. [ ILadies and Gentlemen,— In taking the Chair in this department of the Biological Section of the British .Association, I may perhaps he allowed to offer a few remarks as to what appear to ■me the subjects that properly come within our province, the present condition of our knowledge of those subjects, and the methods we have at our command for [ Lincreasing that knowledge. In the great confederation of the sciences of which this Association seeks to be ; at once the representative, exponent, and advocate, it is indeed difficult to assign ! hard and fast boundaries to any of the different branches of human knowledge, ■ which are grouped, for the sake of convenience, into different sections. The wide ; area of the sciences is not like that of our inhabited world, broken up by various i natural boundaries into numerous kingdoms or empires, each speaking its own t tongue, and striving to maintain its independence of its neighbours, even when not (directly antagonistic to them ; but rather resembles that of some great globe with- i out any such geographical divisions, occupied, it is true, by various races, each having a distinct centre, where its own peculiar language is spoken with the utmost purity, but around those centres gradually intermingling with the other e surrounding races, so that in the border land between any two such points it is < often difficult, if not impossible, to say to which of the two races the inhabitants i belong, or to assign any fixed limit to their respective provinces. Taking, for instance, pure Geology as representing such a centre, we find it in i one direction merging in Geography, in another in Chemistry, and in others in Palaeontology, Biology, and various other sciences. There must, indeed, always he 1 questions in which the students of any two great branches of science will find a c common interest, and which neither can claim as peculiarly their own. So it is with Ethnology and Anthropology, which form our peculiar province. < On the one side this passes into Biology, the science to which we are here affiliated, ■ while on another it shades off into Geography, or again into Geology, while some ; portion of its frontier lies towards two other provinces that at present seem almost - excluded from the federation of the sciences—those of History and Archaeology. With boundaries of necessity so ill-defined, it appears to me that the method of ' treatment of the subject, rather than the actual subject itself, is to he regarded as ' the principal qualification for the admission of any memoir as properly coming within the jurisdiction of this department. Our main, central point—the history of the origin and progress of the human race—must, however, be that around which all our thoughts must revolve, and ' towards which all our investigations must be directed. And yet even here there must he some limitations. With all that comes within the province of History properly so called, with emperors and kings, their generals * This Address to the Department of Ethnology and Anthropology by the Chairman, John Evans, Esq., was accidentally omitted from the Report of the Liverpool Meeting. It ought to have been inserted in p. 143; it will now form part of the Appendix.