RECENT ADVANCES IN SCIENCE 297 



the May number of Man Prof. F. G. Parsons writes " A Reply- 

 to Mr. Py craft's Plea for a Substitute for the Frankfort Base- 

 line," a plea to which I referred in these notes last January. 

 Parsons points out that any such change as Pycraft advocates 

 would need to possess very marked advantages before it could 

 be considered justifiable, as a change would render much recent 

 craniometric work useless for purposes of comparison ; more- 

 over, he thinks Pycraft 's proposed substitute would not be an 

 improvement, even apart from the unavoidable nuisance of 

 any change of standards, but rather the reverse. Prof. Giufifrida- 

 Ruggeri, of Naples University, contributes to the June Man an 

 interesting though extraordinarily digressive article on Egyptian 

 ethnology. The Italian anthropologists (or most of them) 

 divide Homo sapiens into a large number of sub-species or 

 primary races, and the terminology of Italian essays will 

 therefore be unfamiliar to most English readers. It appears 

 probable that the number of sub-species made by this classifica- 

 tion is at once too large and too small ; too large because these 

 sub-species are capable of being grouped into a few more 

 comprehensive racial divisions ; and too small because ulti- 

 mately it will probably be possible to classify mankind on the 

 basis of Mendelian unit-characters, which will involve the 

 creation of numerous new sub-species or types. 



The July Edinburgh Review contains a popular article by 

 Prof. Boyd Dawkins on " The Antiquity of Man," which will not 

 be criticised for its novelty. It should be pointed out that the 

 table given on page 84 conveys a seriously erroneous impression 

 of the geological history of the Primates. The word " Lemu- 

 roids " is printed against the Eocene and Oligocene periods, and 

 the expression " Anthropoid Apes " against the Miocene and 

 Pliocene periods. Now not only the Anthropoidea, but the 

 Simiidse themselves, are known to occur in the Egyptian 

 Oligocene. The existence of an Oligocene ape, the creature 

 named Propliopithecus , is a highly significant fact which tells 

 against Prof. Boyd Dawkins' special theories, and the slip is 

 therefore unfortunate. 



A Neandertaloid mandible discovered near the town of 

 Banolas, in northern Spain, about thirty years ago has now been 

 fully described by Profs. Hernandez-Pacheco and Obermaier 

 in Comision de Investigaciones Paleontologicas y Prehistoricas, 

 memoria numero 6 (Madrid). 



