848 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



reader, at least in America arid England, demands much more than he did 

 twenty years ago. 



The work is so full of interesting material that it is impossible in a re- 

 view of this nature to do more than quote here and there. An illustration 

 of the persistence of certain traits in man is shown in the Tedas or Tebus, 

 which are supposed to be the Troglodytes described by Herodotus. " They 

 are to-day no poorer, no richer, no wiser, no more ignorant than they have 

 been these thousands of years; they have acquired nothing in addition to 

 what they possessed then." He shows in contrast the Europeans emerging 

 from savagery in an exalted place among the peoples of the world. By 

 such a picture do we see the persistence of conditions identical in every 

 respect to those of the animals below us. While a form of Brachiopod 

 may persist nearly unchanged from the lowest geological horizons to the 

 present day, other forms of life may pass through rapid changes and become 

 extinct. A group may go through slow and even changes like the ammon- 

 ites of the Jura and finally culminate in rapid and extraordinary modifi- 

 cations in form. 



In contrasting the inertness of the Chinese with the progressive Euro- 

 pean nations, he quotes Voltaire as '* hitting the point" when he says that 

 "Nature has given the Chinese the organs for discovering all that is useful 

 to them but not for going any further." Peschel presents these contrasts 

 in a clearer way perhaps when he says: "Of all highly civilized nations 

 the Chinese owe least to foreign promptings, whereas until the thirteenth 

 century we — that is to say the Europeans, and especially the northern Euro- 

 peans — owed almost everything but our language to the teaching of other 

 nations. . . . Since our intellectual awakening, since we have come for- 

 ward as the propagators of the treasures of culture, we have indefatigably 

 toiled with the sweat of our brows in search of something, the very exist- 

 ence of which was unsuspected by the Chinese, and which they would 

 think dear at a platter of rice. This invisible object we term causality. 

 We have admired the Chinese for an incalculable number of inventions 

 and have appropriated them, but we are not indebted to them for a single 

 theory or a single glance into the connection or the first causes of phe- 

 nomena." 



The statement is made that Chinese ships are said to have been cast 

 away on the northwest coast of America. In every case the junks which 

 have been cast away on our western coast or found drifting in the North 

 Pacific are Japanese junks, not Chinese. A reference is made to glazed 

 tiles associated with ancient pottery having been exhumed in the Missis- 

 sippi Valley near Natchez. As a matter of fact the tile is post- Columbian. 



The arrangement of cuts is somewhat confusing; they are not always 

 found with the text. As the cuts are not numbered, there is no way of re- 

 ferring to them in the text. On the other hand, a good legend accompanies 

 each illustration, and usually full credit is given to its derivation. Refer- 

 ences to special works on the subject treated would have added greatly to 

 the value of the book. Thus on page 287, Volume II, the author says in 

 speaking of the Hottentots: "If we may believe Kolb, the fortunate hunter 

 undergoes an ' alterative process ' at the hands of some old fellow-tribesman 

 in the form of a hydraulic application which does not bear more minute 

 description." Is he referring to Peter Kolben's remarkable work on the 

 Present State of the Cape of Good Hope, an English translation of which 



