REVIEWS 679 



The Coccideeo! Ceylon. By E. E. Green, F.E.S. Part V. [Pp. 345-472. 

 Plates cxxxiii-cxcia.] (London : Dulau & Co., 1922. Price £i.) 



The appearance of the final part of this important work completes a laborious 

 task upon which Mr. Green has been engaged for a lengthy period. Its 

 publication has extended over twenty-six years, the first part having 

 appeared in 1896, and the author must have devoted a long time to pre- 

 liminary study before embarking upon the venture at all. 



The fauna of Ceylon is a very rich one, and nearly 300 species of Coccidse 

 are now known from that region. Mx. Green's work, however, is much more 

 than of mere faunistic value. It serves as a general introduction to the family 

 of insects with which it deals and a work of reference to the specialist. What- 

 ever taxonomic changes are introduced in the future, we believe that this 

 monograph will hold its own for many years upon the general excellence of 

 its very detailed plates apart from any other feature. The morphologist will 

 turn to it for its wealth of structural detail, and the biologist will find a great 

 mass of information on the metamorphoses of the various species concerned . 

 Mr. Green's monograph is generally recognised as the most important treatise 

 on its group that has yet appeared, and he is to be heartily congratulated upon 

 its completion. The successful production of the final volume during the 

 arduous years of the war, with the maintenance of the same high level as its 

 predecessors, is a triumph in itself. A. D. Imms. 



MISCELLANEOUS 



The American Indian. By Clark Wissler. [Pp. xxi + 474, with 2 maps 

 and 83 illustrations.] (New York and London : Oxford University 

 Press, 1922. Second Edition. Price 24s. net.) 



It is a common failing in much of the literature of social anthropology that 

 the writers lose their thesis in the mass of details which they describe. No 

 such accusation can be brought against this extraordinarily entertaining 

 book on the American Indian. In the first chapter we are shown the food 

 axeas of the New World, as being the fundamental conditioning factors of 

 human life in the two continents ; and then the author passes in review 

 various phases of aboriginal culture, such as domestic animals, ceramic 

 arts, architecture, social regulations, and the literatiure of the Mayas and 

 Aztecs ; then he proceeds to deal with archaeology, chronology, and somatic 

 classification ; and finally at the end of the book we are brought to great 

 generalisations on the origin of the American native. Thus the book has a 

 unity of conception which is quite admirable. Mr. Wissler holds strongly 

 to the view that the American civilisations were evolved quite independently 

 of the Eastern Hemisphere, and in favour of this opinion he cites, among 

 other points, the absence of any idea of the wheel in the Western Hemi- 

 sphere, and the fact that at the time of the discovery of America, all the 

 cultivated plants were peculiar to the Western continents. The absence of 

 the wheel is certainly a negative point of much importance, having regard 

 to the practical value and antiquity of the discovery of the wheel in Eurasia. 

 The origin of the Red Man is considered at length. The ancestors of the 

 American Indian were no doubt Mongoloid savages who made their way 

 across the Behring Strait — or Behring Isthmus, as it may then have been — 

 in comparatively recent times. As to the date of the first colonisation, 

 there is difference of opinion. Hrdlicka thinks it was a post-glacial migra- 

 tion. But Mr. Wissler thinks this gives insufficient time for American 

 developments, and he thinks the Red Man must have arrived before the 

 last glacial period — that is, not later than the last interglacial period. 

 Certainly, the amazing linguistic diversity of the natives makes one sceptical 

 of anything so recent as a post-glacial colonisation. A. G. T. 



