583. ARTHE N. ANTHROPOLOGICAL REVIEW. No. XII. JANUARY, 1866. COMPARATIVE ANTHROPOLOGY OF ENGLAND AND WALES.* By D. MACKINTOSH, F.G.S. "Let some Fellow also do for England what M. Paul Broca has done so well for France, and write us a Memoir on the Ethnology of England."Dr. JAMES HUNT, Anniversary Address before the Anthropological Society of London, delivered January, 1864. IN 1861 I read a paper before the Ethnological Society of London, entiled "Results of Ethnological Observations made during the last ten years in England and Wales." Up to that time ethnology had generally been treated as a branch of philology, archæology, or history. It could not be said to have had an independent foundation, or to have acquired the rank of a distinct department of science. Many, perhaps the majority, of those calling themselves ethnologists did not believe in ethnology according to the most approved and authoritative meaning attached to that word, namely the science of blood, or races of mankind resulting from genealogical descent. The attempt to classify races in Europe, and especially in England, was then generally looked upon as presumptuous, or, at least, as not likely to lead to a satisfactory result. In the discussion which followed the reading of the above paper, one of the Fellows considered the attempt as dangerous, by which I suppose he could only mean dangerous to preconceived theories. Several of the speakers favoured the views of the author, but the majority seemed to agree in thinking that the races described in the paper as occurring in England and Wales were not due to lineal descent from tribes of early inhabitants, but either arose by accident * We propose to publish, from time to time, a series of personal observations on the Comparative Anthropology of the British Islands.-EDITOR. VOL. IV. NO. XII. B |