We learn from the Dundee Adeertizer that the Anthropological 'Society,
which for some years back has been striving to make up for the absence of scientific names from its list of members by creating unscientific disturbances at meetings of the British Association, has been led into a somewhat ignominious fiasco at the annual gathering of the Association. It is to be hoped that this society will henceforward leave Polygenism and the negro alone, and cease to weary the world with their base comparisons. Last year, at Nottingham, Mr. Huxley, who has, as he very well may have, more faith than most Bishops and Canons in the principle that nothing ever has a free course and is glorified unless it deserves it, induced the Association to give the Anthropologists a department to themselves, where they should and did have full opportunity to display their real claims. But somehow the Anthropologists seem to have found this plan of open ventilation too bracing for their nerves, and under what we observe is called " a misapprehension," they resumed their old role of .martyrs, and actually held an indignation meeting to com- plain of being unfairly repressed, &c. The secretary of the sec- tion concerned, Mr. Tristram, the traveller, writes a letter to that ,department in form. Hall in brick and mortar, drafts of resolu- tions, &c., had all been prepared for the Anthropologists, and had been, and were, waiting only to be asked for, and to be taken possession of. A second or third meeting had now to be held, to -correct by a public retractation the " misapprehension " which had occasioned the first to be called, and the outside world has come to see that an Anthropological Society may, like a Tory Ministry, drag its adherents for a long while along tortuous Toads, to end finally with making them " take a leap in the dark," —and into the mire.
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