The British Association dispersed on Thursday, after an un- usually
dull meeting, made duller for Londoners by the atrocious reporting for the London papers. Not one speech, except the President's history of engineering, has been reported at length sufficient to be intelligible. Take Professor Cleland's on anatomy, for instance. We gather from a Scotch report that he said not only, as the London papers put it, that nature had, as regards anatomy, probably reached the limit of its formative force, and would develope, even in myriads of years, no race higher than man, but that the skulls of certain races showed signs that they "had reached the limit beyond which they could not pass in the development of the physical organisation necessary for mental action." That is a hint upon the ques- tion of the possible stereotyping of certain races of the highest interest, but it is lost in the London reports. The majority of the papers read were a little too technical to excite popular interest, while a few, like Mrs. Crawshay's, on her scheme for employing ladies as servants, have no place in such a meeting at all. Papers like hers are for the Social Science Association, not for one which professes at all events to advance positive knowledge. The Council might as well accept essays on chess or whist, or better, for those games might illustrate some curious mathematical pro- positions.
Previous page
