56 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



ANTHBOFOLOaY. By A. G. Thacker, A.R.C.S. 



In the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute for the 

 first six months of last year (vol. li) there are several papers 

 of more than usual interest. F. G. Parsons has an article 

 " On the Long Barrow Race and its Relationship to the Modern 

 Inhabitants of London." This paper is an elaborate reply to 

 some rather startling conclusions set forth by the late Dr. 

 Macdonell in Biometrika as long ago as 1904. Dr. Macdonell 

 averred that a series of London crania, dating from the seven- 

 teenth century a.d., showed that the Londoners of that period 

 were " closer to the Long Barrow British than to the Round 

 Barrow British, Romano-British, Anglo-Saxon, or the Medieval 

 English which are represented in our museums." And in this 

 opinion Dr. Macdonell appears to have had the support of 

 Prof. Karl Pearson ; and, as Mr. Parsons points out, it is some- 

 what surprising that such a startling view did not attract 

 wider attention. Mr. Parsons makes a detailed comparison 

 of these seventeenth-century London skulls with a series of 

 about twenty Long Barrow skulls and with a series of Anglo- 

 Saxon skulls, and he comes to the conclusion that Dr. Mac- 

 donell was entirely in error, and that the London crania were 

 very much nearer to the Anglo-Saxons than to the Long Barrow 

 men. Mr. Parsons makes out a very strong case for this view, 

 which is in accord also with the inherent probabilities of the 

 matter. 



Another article is by Sir Henry Howorth and is entitled 

 " Buddhism in the Pacific." This will be found extremely 

 interesting. The article begins by explaining the two methods 

 of accounting for close and detailed resemblances between 

 cultures, or parts of cultures, in widely separated areas, namely, 

 the conception that such resemblances are due to human 

 minds meeting the same difficulties and problems — quite 

 independently — in the same way (a process which is the exact 

 analogue of what zoologists call convergence), and the other 

 and more natural theory that the resemblances are due to 

 contact and the grafting of one culture upon another. Sir 

 Henry Howorth is entirely in favour of the latter theory as a 

 general principle. He says : " It is, I hold, prima facie im- 

 probable that the same concrete idea should have arisen and 

 been adopted by entirely separate races, except in extremely 

 rare cases, and for myself I could not be induced to adopt the 

 theory in question as a vera causa until every possibility of a 

 graft having occurred had been exhausted." The author then 

 describes the long voyages which the Polynesians, Chinese, and 

 Japanese used to make in the Indian and Pacific Oceans before 

 the coming of Europeans. He then proceeds to discuss a 

 particular and striking case of " a graft," namely, the occurrence 



