THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION.
The proceedings of the British Association at Aberdeen have not been characterized by any startling novelty. The sections began to sit at the receipt of "papers " on the 15th ; additional interest being imparted to the proceedings by the presence of the Prince Consort in Aberdeen.. Lord Rosse opened the section devoted to dry discussions on mathemati- cal and physical science by a discourse on the influence of scientific studies in enticing man to labour with his mind, to look before and after, and thus promoting a moral training. Dr. Lyon Playfair discoursed, in the section where chemists congregated, on the best modes of pursuing the science of chemistry and on the directions in which investigations should work. Sir Charles Lyell delivered, in the geological section, a profound discourse on the antiquity of man. Ia the other sections the opening remarks of the presidents were of a general character. From that day the sections continued to sit for a week. Among the re- markable papers of popular interest read before the sections were one by Professor Owen " on the Craina of the tribes of Nepaul ; " one by Cane tain Sherard Osborne, R.N., on the Yang-tse-Kiang and its probable future commerce ; one by Dr. Anderson, of Newburgh, "on the remains of Man in the superficial drifts ; " one by Mr. Lawrence Oliphant, on Japan ; one by Mr. J. T. Mackenzie, on the Banking institutions of India ; one by Mr. T. Mitchell, on Russian Trade in Central Asia ; one by Mr. Harvey, on the agricultural statistics of Aberdeenshire (showing immense progress since last century); and ono by Colonel Sykes, on the past, present, and future financial condition of India.
Sunday, of course, broke into the learned labours of the associates, but many went abroad invited by the picturesque scenery. The evening meetings were held in the Music Hall, and at one of these Sir Roderick Murchison delivered a masterly lecture on the geological structure and order of the older rocks in the northermost counties of Scotland. It was after the delivery nf this discourse, that Sir David Brewster delivered to Sir Roderick the Brisbane Medal of the Edinburgh Royal Society as a lasting testimonial of their sense of the value of his long labours as a geologist.
On Monday morning a communication was laid before the association relating to a memorial proposed to be raised to the late Baron Humboldt. The communication in question was to the effect that the Prince Consort had been informed that it was in contemplation to found at Berlin a lestimonial commemorative of the great scientific services and attain- ments of Baron Humboldt. It was suggested that the foundation should be called " The Humboldt Foundation for Physical Science and Travels." The Prince stated his intention of subscribing 1001. towards the founda- tion, the proposal for which he stated he considered it to be his duty to lay before the members of the British Association, a body in whose pro- ceedings the late baron had ever evinced a lively interest. The Associa- tion unanimously agreed to cooperate in the work. It has been decided that the next meeting of the Association shall be at Oxford. Major-General Sabine resigned the post of general secretary after "twenty years of unremitting attention to the affairs of the Assoei- don." A vote of thanks to him was passed ; and Professor Walker elected to succeed him. in the office.
The interest of the meeting was greatly increased by the formation of a temporary gallery of portraits and antiquities, illustrating the history of the northern counties of Scotland. Nearly 200 portraits of the most remarkable personages of the country to the north of the Forth and Clyde have been brought together, and the collection is exceedingly curious and instructive, both in an artistic and in an historical point of view. Much, for instance, as the portraiture of Mary Stuart has been elucidated of late, both in Edinburgh and in London, the Aberdeen exhibition presents several pictures of the hapless queen, which have not yet been noticed either by Scotch or English writers, and are obviously of great value in the inquiry. The collection of antiquities ranges from the stone weapons of the aboriginal inhabitants of Caledonia, through the armour, vestments, furniture, and metal work of the Middle Ages, to the targets and claymores which were carried at Sheriffmuir and Cul- loden. The formation of these galleries has been accomplished by the great personal exertions of Mr. Charles Elphinstone Dalrymple, with the efficient assistance of Mr. J. H. Chalmers, and it needs but a glance at the walls and cases to see the skill with which the objects have been selected, and the taste with which they are arranged. The rooms have been crowded from night to morning by visitors of all classes.
The opening address of Sir Charles Lyell on the antiquity of the hu- man race was delivered in the presence of the Prince Consort. Ile said there was a natural reluctance to admit that the bones of man found in caves implied an antiquity greater than that hitherto imagined. Scep- ticism in regard to the cave has, however, been pushed to an extreme. In the course of the last fifteen years another class of proofs have been advanced, into two of which Sir Charles had personally examined. "First, so long ago as the year 1844, M. Aymard, an eminent palaeontologist and antiquary, published an account of the discovery in the volcanic district of Central France, of portions of two human skeletons (the skulls, teeth, and bones) embedded in a volcanic breccia, fouudin the moun- tain of Denise, in the environs of Le Puy. en Velav, a breccia anterior in date to one at least, of the latest eruptions of that volcanic mountain. On the opposite side of the same bill, the remains of a large number of mammalia, moat of them of extinct species, have been detected in tufaceous strata, be- lieved, and, I think, correctly, to be of the same age. The authenticity of the human fossils was from the first disputed by several geologists, but ad- mitted by the majority of those who visited Le Puy and saw with their own eyes the original specimen now in the museum of that town. Among others, M. Pictet, so well known. to you by his excellent work on palaeontology, de- clared after his visit to the spot his adhesion to the opinions previously ex- pressed by Aymard. My friend Mr. Scrope, in the second edition of his volcanoes of Central France, lately published, also adopted the same con- clusion, although after accompanying me this year to Le Puy he has seen reason to modify his views. The result of our joint examination, a result, which, I believe, essentially coincides with that arrived at by MM. Lieber and Lartet, names well known to science, who have also thisyear gone into this inquiry on the spot, may thus be stated : We are by no means prepared to maintain that the specimen in the museum at Le Puy (which unfortunately was never seen in situ by any scientific observer) is a fabrication. On the contrary, we incline to believe that the human fossils in this and some other specimens from the -same hill were really imbedded by natural causes in their present matrix. But the rock in which they are entombed consists of two parts, one of which is a compact, and for the moat part thinly lami- nated stone, into which none of the human bones penetrate; the other con- bluing the bones is a lighter and much more porous stone, without lamina- tion, to which we could find nothing similar in the mountains of Denise, although both M. Hebert and I made several excavations on the alleged site of the fossils. M. Hebert, therefore, suggested to me that this more porous stone which resembles in colour and mineral composition, though not in structure, parts of the genuine old breccia of Denise, may be made up of the older rock broken up and afterwards redeposited, or, as the French say, ' remane,' and therefore of much newer date—a hypothesis which well deserves consideration, but I feel that we are at present so ignorant of the precise circumstances and position under which these celebrated human fossils were found, that I ought not to waste time in speculating on their probable mode of interment, but simply declare that in my opinion they afford no demonstration of men having witnessed the last volcanic eruptions of Central France. The skulls, according to the judgment of the most com- petent osteologista who have yet seen them, do not seem to depart in a marked manner from the modern European or Caucasian type, and the human bones are in a fresher state than those of the elephas meridionalia and other quadrupeds found in any breccia of Denise which can be referred to the period even of the latest volcanic eruptions. " But while I have thus failed to obtain satiefactory evidence in favour of the remote origin assigned to the human fossils of Le Puy, I am fully prepared to corroborate the conclusions which have been recently laid be- fore the Royal Society by Mr. Prestwick, in regard to the age of the flint implements associated in undisturbed gravel, in the north of France, with the bones of elephants, at Abbeville and Amiens. These were first noticed at Abbeville, and their true geological position assigned to them by M. Boucher do Pcrthes, in 1849, in his Antiquites Celtiques,' while those of Amiens were afterwards described in 18.55 by the late Dr. Rigollot. For a clear statement of the facts, I may referyou to the abstract of Mr. Prest- wick's Memoir, in the proceedings of the Royal Society for 18:59, and have only to add that I have myself obtained abundance of flint implements (some of which are laid upon the table) during a short visit to Amiens and Abbeville. Two of the worked flints of Amiens were discovered in the gravel-pits of St. Acheul—one at the depth of 10 and the other of 17 feet below the surface, at the time of my visit ; and M. Georges Pouecht, of Rouen, author of a work on the Races of Man,' who has since visited the spot, has extracted with his own hands one of these implements, as Messrs. Prestwick and Flower had done before him. The stratified gravel resting immediately on the chalk in which these rudely-fashioned instruments are buried, belongs to the post-pliocenc period, all the fresh water and land shells which accompany them being of existing species. The great number of the fossil instruments, which have been likened to hatchets, spear-heads, and wedges, is truly wonderful. More than a thousand of them have al- ready been met with in the last ten years, in the valley of the Somme, in an area of fifteen miles in length. I infer that a tribe of savages, to whom the use of iron was unknown, made a long sojourn in this region ; and I am remiuded of a large Indian mound, which 1 saw in St. Simon's Island, in Georgia—a mound of ten acres in area, and having an average height of five feet, chiefly composed of cast-away oyster-shells, throughout which arrow-heads, stone axes, and Indian pottery are dispersed. if the neigh- bouring river, the Alatamaha, or the sea, which is at hand, should invade, sweep away, and stratify the contents of this mound, it might produce a very analogous accumulation of human implements, unmixed perhaps with human bones. Although the accompanying shells are of living species, I believe the antiquity of the Abbeville and Amiens Hint instruments to be great indeed if compared to the times of history or tradition. I consider the gravel to be of fluvistile origin, but I could detect nothing in the structure of its several parts indicating cataclysmal action, nothing that might not be due to such river floods as we have witnessed in Scotland during the last half century. It must have required a long period for the wearing down of the chalk which supplied the broken flints for the formation of so much gravel at various heights, sometimes one hundred feet above the present level of the Somme, for the deposition of fine sediment, including entire shells, both terrestrial and aquatic, and also for the denudation which the entire mass of stratified drift has undergone, portions having been swept away, so that what remains of it often terminates abruptly in old river- cliffs, besides being covered by a newer unstratified drift. To explain these changes I should infer considerable oscillations in the level of the land in that part of France—slow movements of upheaval and subsidence, deranging but not wholly displacing the course of the ancient rivers. Lastly, the dis- appearance of the elephant, rhinoceros, and other genera of quadrupeds now foreign to Europe, implies, in like manner, a vast lapse of ages, separating the era in which the fossil implements were framed and that of the invasion of Gaul by the Romans. Among the problems of high theoretical interest which the recent progress of geology and natural history has brought into notice, no one is more prominent, and, at the same time, more obscure, than that relating to the origin of species." Dr. Anderson, of Newburgh, afterwards referred to the subject.
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