The Hottentots and Caffres are more distinct, linguistically and physically, than the former are from equatorial Negroes, or the latter from the Nubians; yet they both inhabit one well-marked zoological province, South Africa.

Two varieties of mankind-the Papuan and Malayan-inhabit Borneo and other islands at the eastern part of the Indian Archipelago; these islands forming one and the same zoological and botanical province.

Not less than twenty colours have been found requisite to indicate in a map of the British Islands the different varieties and sub-varieties of the human race that have contributed to its miscellaneous population.

Other facts of the same kind might be cited, affecting the conformity of the distribution of man with that of the lower animals and plants, as absolutely enunciated in some recent works. Nor can we be surprised to find that the migratory instincts of the human species, with the peculiar endowment of adaptiveness to all climates, should have produced modifications in geographical distribution to which the lower forms of living nature have not been subject. It is only since man began to exercise his privilege and power, that the geographical laws in regard to the lower animals of existing species have begun to be blotted out.

Ethnology is a wide and fertile subject, and I should be led far beyond the limits of an inaugural discourse were I to indulge in an historical sketch of its progress. But I may advert to the uniform testimony of different witnesses to the concurrence of distinct species of evidence-as to the much higher antiquity of the human race, than has been assigned it in historical and genealogical records.

Mr. Leonard Horner sagaciously discerned the value of the phenomena of the annual sedimentary deposits of the Nile in Egypt as a test of the lapse of time during which that most recent and still operating geological dynamic had been in progress. In two memoirs communicated to the Royal Society in 1855 and 1858, the results of ninety-five vertical borings through the alluvium thus formed are recorded.

The Nile sediment at the lowest depth reached is very similar in composition to that of the present day. In the lowest part of the boring of the sediment at the colossal statue in Memphis, at a depth of 39 feet from the surface of the ground, the boring-instrument is reported to have brought up a piece of pottery. This Mr. Horner infers to be a record of the existence of man 13,371 years before A.D. 1854; "of man, moreover, in a state of civilization, so far, at least, as to be able to fashion clay into vessels, and to know how to harden them by the action of a strong heat*."

Prof. Max Müllert has opened out a similar vista into the remote past of the history of the human race by the perception and application of analogies in the formation of modern and ancient, of living and dead languages.

* Proceedings of the Royal Society, Feb. 11, 1858, vol. ix. p. 128-134.
†'Oxford Essays,' 1857.

From the relations traceable between the six Romance dialects, Italian, Wallachian, Rhætian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French, an antecedent common 'mother-tongue' might be inferred, and consequently the existence of a race anterior to the modern Italians, Spanish, French, &c., with conclusions as to the lapse of time requisite for such divisions and migrations of the primitive stock, and for the modifications which the mother-language had undergone. History and preserved writings show that such common mother-race and language have existed in the Roman people and the Latin tongue.

But Latin, like the equally 'dead' language Greek, with Sanscrit, Lithuanian, Zend, and the Gothic, Slavonic, and Celtic tongues, can be similarly shown to be modifications of one antecedent common language; whence is to be inferred an antecedent race of men, and a lapse of time sufficient for their migration over a track extending from Iceland in the north-west to India in the south-east, and for all the above-named modifications to have been established in the common mother 'Arian' tongue.

The study of the animal kingdom has its practical results of national importance in relation to sources of food and beasts of traction and burden. Acts of Parliament relating to Fisheries, in order to realize their aims, must be based on physiological and zoological data. Animal physiology, the most important ground of successful medicine and surgery, is closely bound up with the right progress of zoology, of which, indeed, with zootomy, it is a branch. The great instrument of zoological science, as Lord Bacon points out, is a Museum of Natural History.

Every civilized state in Europe possesses such a Museum. That of England has been progressively developed to the extent which the restrictive circumstances under which it originated have allowed. The public is now fully aware, by the reports that have been published by Parliament, by representations to Government, and by articles in Reviews and other Periodicals, of the present condition of the National Museum of Natural History and of its most pressing requirements.

Of them the most pressing, and the one essential to rendering the collections worthy of this great empire, is 'space.' Our colonies include parts of the earth where the forms of plants and animals are the most strange. No empire in the world had ever so wide a range for the collection of the various forms of animal life as Great Britain. Never was there so much energy and intelligence displayed in the capture and transmission of exotic animals by the enterprising traveller in unknown lands and by the hardy settler in remote colonies, as by those who start from their native shores of Britain. Foreign Naturalists consequently visit England anticipating to find in her capital and in her National Museum the richest and most varied materials for their comparisons and deductions. And they ought to be in a state pre-eminently conducive to the advancement of a philosophical zoology, and on a scale commensurate with the greatness of the nation and the peculiar national facilities for such perfection.

But, in order to receive and to display zoological specimens, space must be had; and not merely space for display, but for orderly display: the galleries should bear relation in size and form with the nature of the classes respectively occupying them. They should be such "as to enable the student or intelligent visitor to discern the extent of the class, and to trace the kind and order of the variations which have been superinduced upon its common or fundamental characters." In the British Museum one gallery permits this to be done in regard to the class of Birds. "To show how the mammalian type is progressively modified and raised from the form of the fish or lizard to that of man; to illustrate the gradations by which one order merges into another; to impart to the visitor, by the arts of arrangement and juxtaposition, a knowledge of his own class akin to that which he derives from the collection of birds, would require a corresponding Mammalian Gallery*."

The same is to be said of the classes of Reptiles and Fishes, and of the Molluscous, Articulate, and Radiate Provinces.

An osteological collection is as indispensable to the illustration of the Vertebrata as a conchological one is to that of the Mollusca. Nor should the size of any of the skeletons be a bar to the obtainment of adequate space for the Osteological Collection in the National Museum of Natural History. The very fact of the Whales being the largest animals that now exist, or have at any period lived upon the earth, is that which makes it more imperative to illustrate the fact and gratify the natural interest of the public by the adequate and convenient exhibition of their skeletons.

In like manner, in the Paleontological collections or galleries of Fossil remains, the restoration of every extinct species, however bulky, should be carried out where practicable.

The locality of such adequately-sized Museum concerns the administrator and the public convenience. Reasons for its association with Ethnological Antiquities and the National Library have been assigned in a memorial to H. M. Government, and by the Deputation of cultivators of Science to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and these reasons have been commented on in a late Number of the 'Quarterly Review.'

I am most concerned in advocating the pressing necessity of adequate space for the National Museum of Natural History, wherever administrative wisdom may see fit to locate it. And, wherever that Museum may ultimately stand, it is the duty of the Representative of Associated British Science here to urge that the Curator of each class of animals should have assigned to him the charge of delivering a public course of lectures on the characters, principles of classification, habits, instincts, and economical uses of such class.

* "Report to the Trustees of the British Museum from the Superintendent of the Natural History Departments, 7th January, 1857," Parliamentary printed Paper, 379, p. 23 (1858). The most elaborate and beautiful of created things-those manifesting life-have much to teach-much that comes home to the business of man, and also to the highest elements of his moral nature. The nation that gathers together thousands of corals, shells, insects, fishes, birds, and beasts, and votes the requisite funds for preparing, preserving, housing and arranging them, derives the smallest possible return for the outlay by merely gazing and wondering at the manifold variety and strangeness of such specimens of Natural History.

The simplest coral and the meanest insect may have something in its history worth knowing, and in some way profitable. Every organism is a character in which Divine wisdom is written, and which ought to be expounded. Our present system of opening the book of Nature to the masses, as in the Galleries of the British Museum, without any provision for expounding her language, is akin to that which keeps the book of God sealed to the multitude in a dead tongue.

Finally, in reference to a National Museum of Natural History, I would respectfully solicit the attention of the Administrator to the successful working and unprecedented progress of the National Botanical Establishment at Kew, of the Museum of Practical Geology in Jermyn Street, and of the Museum of Practical Art at South Kensington, in reference to the relations of the eminent Directors of those establishments to Government. For this opens the question, whether in the event of acquiring, in whatever locality, the element essential to a National Museum of Natural History-space-any intermediate organization, unknown in the public establishments above cited, be really needed in the case of Natural History, in order to afford Parliament and the public the requisite guarantee of the good condition of the Collections, and the efficient discharge of the duties and functions of the National Museum of Natural History.

The sciences promoted by the statistical Section F., although bearing more immediately than any others on the prosperity of nations and the well-being of mankind, had no existence in the time of Bacon.

We look in vain for any evidence, for example, of a clear conception of Sanitary Science, or the doctrines preventive of disease, in the writings of that great philosopher and politician. The only approach to Statistics which we find in the 'Historia Vitæ et Mortis,' for example, is a collection of instances of longevity; and the main aim of that Essay seems to have been the extreme prolongation of particular or individual life, not the insurance of average longevity to the species. Some remarks on the advantage of pure air are congenial with the aims of the modern sanitary philosopher; but he finds no evidence of Bacon's conception of its importance to the masses, or of the means of ensuring it to populous cities, for prevention of plague and pestilence. Sanitary science, as a great power for mankind, in the Baconian sense, is of very recent growth: and, whether we consider the present evidence of its potency where it has been rightly applied, or the present 1858.

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evidence of the miserable results of its neglect, we must be stimulated to use every effort to promote its progress and impress its importance on all who may aid therein.

Long after Lord Bacon's day, the plague, the fever of the 'black assize,' and the like visitations, which drove Courts and Parliaments and Royal Societies from town to country, were met only by rude quarantine imprisonments of the sick, which greatly aggravated the sum of mortality. Accidents, such as the fire of London, subliming much old and vested filth, and followed by wider streets and better dwellings, produced results which opened the eyes of a few thinkers to the relation between certain physical conditions and the non-return of the plague.

Now, however, these relations have been comprehensively investigated; the diseases produced or aggravated by preventible conditions are well known; the most efficient and economical modes of prevention have been the subject of successful and convincing experiment. But men are slow to act where the profitable result is not direct. Health, we call, with cuckoo-cry, the greatest blessing; but practically it is daily sacrificed to ambition, wealth, pleasure, and a hundred aims in which duty takes no necessary part. That, however, is an affair of individual free-will with which abstract science has no business.

But in reference to inevitable aggregates of mankind, the nation is concerned in the science which seeks their especial bodily well-being. Fleets, armies, manufactories, workshops, the localities in towns where wage-people* congregate, such are conditions of citizens in which it behoves the State, to the utmost constitutional extent of its power, to apply the ascertained means of preventing disease and death.

Perhaps the most exemplary instances of the value and economy of sanitary science are afforded by the records of the British Navy, especially since the period of Capt. Сооk, whose name, were I to select one, as a prime promoter of the science, would be that which I should adduce with highest veneration. Some of the Arctic Expeditions, also, illustrate in an exemplary degree the value of preventive measures in maintaining health under difficult and depressing circumstances.

Our armies have yet to receive the benefit of what is now known in the prevention of death by disease. To what extent they have to benefit by it has been made plain by the results of recent investigations, in which the testimony of FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE shines forth as the beacon which lights to better measures.

* I venture to propose this term as free from the objections that have been made to "lower orders," "humbler classes," " poorer classes," " working classes," " labouring population," &c. The two former are a reflection on those who are so designated; and the two latter are an implied reflection on all other classes, as if left to a life of vacant inoccupation. They are injuriously misleading terms. The true specific character of the great class in question is seen by the Naturalist to be "payment by wages"; it is the "wage-class."