Abstract
LONDON Anthropological Institute, Dec. 22.-Prof. Busk, F.R.S., president, in the chair.-Mr. J. Park Harrison exhibited tracings of late Phoenician characters from the south-west of Sumatra. They are said to be still in use, and differ entirely from early letters in other parts of the island. The natives have a tradition that some descendants of Alexander settled there; and if Nearchns' second expedition, the account of which is lost, reached the Bay of Bengal, the date, Mr. Harrison considered, would, agree sufficiently well with the letters. His sailors were principally Tyrians.-Col. Lane Fox read a paper on early modes of navigation, in which he described the various contrivances employed by savage races for transit on the water. Commencing with the simple trunk canoe, the author traced the development of the art of boat and ship-building through the stages of stitched plank canoes, bark canoes, rafts, outrigger canoes, single and double, the double canoe, the variation of hull, the weather platform, the rudder, and the rude sail, and gave the distribution of their many forms and modifications. It was argued that the rude bark float of the Australian, the Tasmanian, and the Ethiopian, the catamaran of the Papuan, the dug-out canoe of the New Zealander, and the built-up canoe of the Samoan, were survivals representing successive stages in the development of the art of shipbuilding, not lapses to ruder methods of construction as the result of degradation; that each stage supplies us with examples of what at one time was the perfection of the art countless ages ago. Some of the more primitive kinds spread over nearly the whole world, whilst others had a more limited area of distribution. Taken together, they enabled us to trace back the history of shipbuilding from the time of the earliest sculptures to the commencement of the art.
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Societies and Academies . Nature 11, 199–200 (1875). https://doi.org/10.1038/011199b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/011199b0