Dr. Hooker has been elected President of the British Association
for the Advancement of Science for this year, and delivered his inaugural address on Wednesday at Norwich. We have mentioned one feature of his speech elsewhere, his advice that physics and metaphysics should be pursued separately, advice given evidently under a strong feeling of contempt for popular theology, or indeed, we imagine, for any theology at all. He defended Darwin strongly, and declared that his theory of Pangenesis,—the transmission of undeveloped cells through generations,—was a hypothecia which, if it did not fully explain, at least provisionally correlated most of
the phenomena of reproduction and inheritance. The most popu- lar portion of his address, however, was devoted to prehistoric archeology, an international Congress on that subject holding its sittings in Norwich at the same time as the larger body. He told his audience among other facts that it was occasionally possible to test prehistoric records by modern experience, for he had himself found in India a tribe, the Cossyahs, of Eastern Bengal, who put up cromlechs, and dolmens, and other megalithic structures, just as our own Druids did, and call them by the same names too, both using the same word, "man," for stone. A very thorough investiga- tion of the manners, habits, and languages of these people and of the other aboriginal tribes of India has now been ordered by the Government.
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