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the inventive faculties no further. At best they may have availed themselves of the wrecks during the last century or two of their insular existence, to barb their arrows with iron instead of fish-bone, and to get from broken bottles such trenchant fragments as our oldest-known Europeans obtained from broken flints. The animal appetites are gratified in the simplest animal fashion; there is no sense of nakedness, no sentiment of shame. The man, choosing promiscuously for one or more years after puberty, then takes, or has assigned to him, a female who becomes his exclusive mate and servant; and the reason assigned for this monogamy is that she may be restricted, while he may continue to select from the unmarried females as before. The climate dispenses with the necessity of any other protection of the body than a paste of earth and oil. Any rudiment of a cincture relates solely to the convenience of the suspension of weapons or other portable objects. They are not cannibals. Implacably hostile to strangers, the Andamaners have made no advance in the few centuries during which their seas have been traversed by ships of higher races. Perhaps the sole change is that of the materials for weapons derived from casual wrecks, to which allusion has already been made.

Enjoying, therefore, the merest animal life during those centuries, why may they not have so existed for thousands of years? The conditions of existence being such as they now enjoy, on what can the ethnologist found an idea of the limitation of the period during which the successive generations of Andamaners have continued so to exist? Antecedent generations of the race may have coexisted with the slow and gradual geological changes which have obliterated the place or continent of their primitive origin, whatever be the hypothesis adopted regarding it.

In every essential of human physical character, however, the present Mincopies or Andamaners participate with their more intellectually gifted brethren. The size of the brain, indicated by the cranial chamber, promises aptitude for civilization. The Andamaners resemble the orangs and chimpanzeee only in their diminutive stature; but this is associated with the wellbalanced human proportions of trunk to limbs: they are, indeed, surpassed by the great orangs and gorillas in the size of the trunk and in the length and strength of the arms, in a greater degree than are the more advanced and taller races of mankind.

PLATE VI.

Side view of the skull of the male native of the Andamans: natural size.

Fig. 1. Front view

Fig. 2. Base view

PLATE VII.

of the same skull, on the scale of an inch to an inch.

Fig. 3. Bony palate and grinding surface of the teeth of the same skull: natural size.

Report from the Balloon Committee. By Colonel SYKES, M.P., F.R.S. PROFESSOR WALKER, after the appointment of the Committee at the Aberdeen Meeting, having communicated to Colonel Sykes his inability to undertake any active labours with respect to carrying out the objects for which the Committee was nominated, Colonel Sykes put himself into correspondence with Mr. Langley, a gentleman of Newcastle, who offered to construct a suitable balloon, provided an advance of money were made to him. The correspondence however was without result, and Colonel Sykes in consequence thought it unnecessary to invite the opinions of the other members of the Committee with respect to the objects to be sought for in balloon-ascents,

as means were wanting, whatever those opinions might be, to give practical effect to them. Colonel Sykes was not at the meeting at Oxford last year, and no action having been taken by the Balloon Committee, it has dropped through and is extinct.

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Within a few months past Mr. Simpson, of Cremorne Gardens, has constructed a balloon at a cost of £600 (the Normandie'), with a sufficient capacity to carry two persons to great heights, which might be available for the objects of the Association. The occasion has therefore arisen when the re-appointment of a Balloon Committee might take place; and as one of the chief objects of the last Balloon Committee, viz. the verification of the former results of the ascents undertaken by the authority of the Association, remains unchanged, Colonel Sykes, with the approval of those members of the late Balloon Committee with whom he has had an opportunity of conversing, will move the re-appointment of the Committee with a grant of £200.

Report on the Repetition of the Magnetic Survey of England, made at the request of the General Committee of the British Association. By Major-General EDWARD SABINE, R.A., President of the Royal Society.

THE Magnetic Survey of the British Islands, corresponding to the epoch of January 1, 1837, which had been undertaken in 1836 at the request of the British Association, was completed in 1838, and a coordinated Report of the observatious of the Dip and Force, contributed by each of the five Members of the Association who had cooperated in the execution of the Survey, was published in the annual volume for 1838, accompanied by Maps of the Isoclinal and Isodynamic Lines embodying the results of the Survey. The observations of the third element, the Declination, which were made chiefly by one of the cooperators, Sir James Clark Ross, were not published until a later date, when, having been reduced and coordinated by myself, they were included in a memoir printed in the Philosophical Transactions for 1849, entitled "On the Isogonic Lines, or Lines of equal Magnetic Declination in the Atlantic Ocean in 1840," in which they completed in a very satisfactory manner the N.E. portion of the map accompanying that memoir.

The Magnetic Survey of 1837 deserves to be remembered as having been the first complete work of its kind planned and executed in any country as a national work, coextensive with the limits of the state or country, and embracing the three magnetic elements. The example thus presented was speedily followed by the execution of similar undertakings in several parts of the globe; more particularly in the Austrian and Bavarian dominions, and in detached portions of the British Colonial Possessions, viz. in North America and India. The immediate object of such surveys is to determine for the particular epoch at which they are made, the positions of Lines of equal Declination, Inclination, and Magnetic Force in the area of the Survey; the angles at which the three classes of lines respectively cross the geographical meridians; and the distances in geographical miles, measured in directions perpendicular to the lines, which correspond to equal increments of each of the magnetic elements. By the extension and multiplication of such surveys far more satisfactory materials are supplied for the construction of general magnetic maps of the globe than are afforded by the desultory observations which had previously formed their only basis. This, as already stated, is the immediate object of such Surveys; but they have in prospect another and a scarcely less important purpose, in contributing by their repetition at stated intervals to

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