Address to the Anthropological Section of the British Association / by Sir William Turner.

  • Turner, Wm. (William), Sir, 1832-1916.
Date:
[1889]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Address to the Anthropological Section of the British Association / by Sir William Turner. 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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    NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE, 1889. ADDEESS TO THE ANTHEOPOLOGICAL SE.^^^^ OF THE BEITISH ASSOCIATIOI BY Professor Sir WILLIAM TURNER, M.B., LL.D., PRESIDENT OF THE SECTION. TwENTT-six years have passed by since the British Assoeiatiou for the Advance- ment of Science lost 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 v^eather, 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 occa- sion, 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 Linnsean 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 186(3, 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 bring together, as it were, into a single focus all those workers who apply (hem- selves to the study of man in his various aspects. issy. H