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424 TROPICAL NATUREto distinct and higher agencies than such as have affectedtheir development.Antiquity of Intellectual ManThere is yet another line of inquiry bearing upon thissubject to which I wish to call your attention. It is a somewhatcurious fact that, while all modern writers admit thegreat antiquity of man, most of them maintain the veryrecent development of his intellect, and will hardly contemplatethe possibility of men equal in mental capacity toourselves having existed in prehistoric times. This questionis generally assumed to be settled by such relics as have beenpreserved of the manufactures of the older races, showinga lower and lower state of the arts ; by the successivedisappearance in early times of iron, bronze, and pottery;and by the ruder forms of the older flint implements. Theweakness of this argument has been well shown by Mr.Albert Mott in his very original but little-known presidentialaddress to the Literary and Philosophical Society of Liverpoolin 1873. He maintains that " our most distant glimpsesof the past are still of a world peopled as now with men bothcivilised and savage," and " that we have often entirely misreadthe past by supposing that the outward signs of civilisationmust always be the same, and must be such as are foundamong ourselves." In support of this view he adduces avariety of striking facts and ingenious arguments, a few ofwhich I will briefly summarise.Sculptures on Easter IslandOn one of the most remote islands of the Pacific Easterisland 2000 miles from South America, 2000 from theMarquesas, and more than 1000 from the Gambier islands,are found hundreds of gigantic stone images, now mostly inruins.They are often forty feet high, while some seem tohave been much larger, the crowns on their heads, cut out ofa red stone, being sometimes ten feet in diameter, while eventhe head and neck of one is said to have been twenty feethigh. 1platforms.These images once all stood erect on extensive stone1 Journ. of Roy. Geog. Soc., 1870, pp. 177, 178.