ANTHROPOLOGY. 501 



L'Hoinme avant I' Histoire. Following- up Professor Flower's attempt 

 to siiinmoii tlio teeth as a witness to the various types of mankind, Dr. 

 Fauvelle employs the dental system to teach the ancestral origin of our 

 race. Indeed, there needs to be stated only the titles of a few important 

 papers to show the many gates through which anthropogenists hope to 

 enter the successful answer. Such, for instance, are " The morphological 

 place of man in the mammalian series," by Paul Albrecht ; " The origin, 

 races, and antiquity of man," by B. Platz ; "A new theory of heredity,", 

 by C. Weigert; "The latest phases of heredity," by A. M. Selling ; "Can 

 the existence of a tendency to change in the form of the skeleton of the 

 parent result in the actuality of that change in the offspring," by W. 

 Arbuthnot Lane ; " The modern theories of generation and heredity," 

 by E. G. Balbiani; "The heredity of crime, alcoholism, etc.," byG. Al- 

 geri ; "The history of transformism," by A. Giard ; " Origin of the fit- 

 test," by E. D. Cope; " Evolution and creation," by J. H. Hardwicke; 

 "Lessons upon man according to the doctrine of evolution," But the 

 most nsefnl treatise upon this point is that of Dr. Topinard, the lecture 

 of March 21, 1S88, before L'f]cole d'anthropologie, entitled, Les dernieres 

 etapes de la genealogie de I'Homme, and published in Revue d'anthro- 

 pologie in the month of May in the same year. 



In Nature (xxxvi, 2G8; 341) is reviewed one of the most thought in- 

 spiring works that have come within our notice durmg the two years 

 under consideration, Mr. G. J. JJomaine's paper before the Linnaau So- 

 ciety (see also iSTineteenth Century, No. cxix, 1887, 59-80) on physiolog- 

 ical selection. The author is entirely in harmony with Mr. Darwin 

 about the intent and extent of natural selection as the iireserver of 

 forms, but looks to other causes to create the variations to be selected 

 and conserved. "If," says he, "variation should be such that while 

 showing some degree of sterility with the parent form, it continues to 

 be as fertile as before within the limits of the varietal form, it wonld 

 neither be swamped by intercrossing nor die out on account of sterility." 

 In human evolution of varieties there have been going on exactly such 

 excluding forces, shutting off to inbreeding color, clan, caste, nation- 

 ality, religion, and the like. A paper read by Dr. Burnett before the 

 Washington Anthropological Society on the Melungeons in the south- 

 ern Alleghanies is a case in point. Neither white nor black nor Indi- 

 ans, these people live encysted, like the Basques of the Pyrenees and 

 little contaminated by mixture. 



One of the first convictions of the elder anthropologists of the last 

 century was that man comes within the domain of scientific considera- 

 tion only so fast as we can api)ly to him processes of counting, weigh- 

 ing, and tabulation. The progress of anthropometry has been along 

 the lines of refined apparatus and the subjecting of new parts of the 

 body to the metric processes. Anthropometry applied to the living 

 also to a large extent replaces the measuring of the skeleton. Rate of 

 growth, stature, size, weight, proportion, vigor, strength of muscle and 



