i 4 o SCIENCE PROGRESS 



certainly evolved far in other respects. The probability is that 

 most barbarous peoples have diverged almost as much mentally 

 as they have physically from that hypothetical being, the 

 common ancestor of all the races of Homo sapiens. 



Among the contributions to Man for the first three months 

 of the current year, anthropologists will probably find the 

 book-reviews the most valuable and interesting, since the 

 original articles suffer, as is not infrequently the case in this 

 publication, from their extreme brevity. The March number 

 contains, however, an important note by M. W. H. Beech on 

 pre-Bantu inhabitants of the Kikuyu district of East Africa, 

 where native tradition speaks of an early race of earth-gnomes, 

 probably either Pygmies or Bushmen. To the same number 

 of the magazine Miss A. C. Breton contributes some careful 

 notes on the stone implements to be seen in the chief Australian 

 museums. 



The second part of vol. xliv. (July to December 1914) ol 

 the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain 

 has now been published. The first paper is a detailed study 

 of the famous "Cheddar Man," by Professors Seligman and 

 Parsons. This is the skeleton found in Gough's Cave, Cheddar, 

 Somersetshire, in 1903, and both the skull and the artifacts 

 associated with it are here fully described. The original ex- 

 cavations were carried out very crudely (the cave itself was first 

 discovered as long ago as 1877) and the exact positions of most 

 of the flints and mammalian remains are consequently in doubt, 

 but the authors conclude that the man belonged to the Magda- 

 lenian division of the Late Paleolithic (Deutolithic) period, and 

 that he was closely akin to that minor craniological variety 

 known as the " River Bed Type." These opinions are probably 

 correct, but there is nothing characteristically Magdalenian about 

 the mammi-fauna. Another paper of extreme interest is one by 

 the Hon. J. Abercromby on " The Prehistoric Pottery of the 

 Canary Islands and its Makers." When the Canaries were 

 discovered at the beginning of the fifteenth century, the inhabit- 

 ants of the different islands were almost completely isolated 

 from one another, the art of navigation having been lost. It 

 is supposed that the first colonisation took place in mid- 

 Neolithic times, and the aboriginals fall into three chief races, 

 one of which is said to show certain points of resemblance to 

 the tall Cro-Magnon race known from the Late Pleistocene of 



