1896. SOME NEW BOOKS. 123 



a scientific mind and an appreciation of the needs of learners. The 

 misfortune of the book is that it has been written by a hbrary student, 

 who has not had either the advantage of teaching the subject, or, 

 apparently, any practical experience in anthropological investigations, 

 and who, therefore, could not appraise the value of much of the 

 evidence he so diligently garnered, or check the statements that he 

 copied. We have no wish to be hypercritical, nor do we wish to 

 cast all the blame upon the author; a man can no longer be proficient 

 in all branches of knowledge. But, as we have often maintained, a 

 book for beginners should not contain obvious errors, and we cannot 

 withhold censure from the University Press and from the Editor for 

 passing an unusually large number in the present work. If Mr. 

 Guillemard did not feel quite certain on some points, he could easily 

 have asked experts to help him. The presence of pigment " under 

 the second (Malpighian) skin " ; the increase of pigment due to 

 " excess of vegetable food, yielding more carbon than can be com- 

 pletely assimilated " (p. 171) ; the effect of " a volcanic environment 

 like that of Java " in causing early man " to shed the wool and retain 

 the sleek hair " (p. 263) ; " spiders and other insects " (p. 52) : these 

 ideas would surely not pass muster in the Cambridge biological 

 schools. The geology is equally quaint: "Trenton, Niagara, and 

 other formations, doubtfully of Silurian age " ; Eozoon " is now known 

 to be a mineral " (p. 52) ; " the few or no traces of glaciation " in the 

 Chalk, Carboniferous and older periods, are due to " exceeding high 

 temperature " (p. 59) : but " Croll, reasoning with the intuitive genius 

 of a Kepler " is a spectre from the past that we thought had been 

 laid at Cambridge for ever. Other examples that we might select 

 are, perhaps, due to carelessness, but that is not less culpable. Thus, 

 zoologists are said to " detach from the Class Mammals the large and 

 widespread group of Apes and Half- Apes " (p. 17); on p. 144 the 

 skull of Pithecanthropus is said to show " characters intermediate 

 between gorilla and Neanderthal," while on the next page the 

 Neanderthal calvarium is described as " altogether the most ape-like 

 skull hitherto discovered " ; and, inexcusable in a book that is 

 nothing if not evolutionist, A. R. Wallace is hailed as " one of the 

 originators of the doctrine of evolution " (p. 32). This last sentence 

 suggests that the author is as unacquainted with the history of philo- 

 sophy as he is with the ideas of zoology. The family-trees of the 

 human varieties are very useful in explaining Mr. Keane's views as 

 to relationships ; but the number of roots with which he has provided 

 each one, even that of the Hominidae, suggests to the zoologist that 

 the author maintains the polyphyletic origin of man, though that is 

 far from his intention. There is pedantry in the frequent use of the 

 term Hominidae, and a specious precision in speaking of Homo Mon- 

 golicics, Homo Amevicanus, etc. ; any biologist would naturally assume 

 that these were names of species, but after some trouble he would 

 find that Mr. Keane was abusing technical terminology by referring 

 to varieties, and not species, in this manner. 



We sympathise with Mr. Keane in his attempts to extend the 

 antiquity of man. Still, we may suggest to him that, when discussing 

 Dr. Noetling's discovery of cliipped flints in Burma, he should not 

 have overlooked Mr. R. D. Oldham's criticism (Natural Scienxe, 

 vol. vii., p. 201, September, 1895). 



Mr. Keane has made linguistics a great feature of the book, and 

 deals lucidly with the relation of stock languages to stock races, and 

 with the evolution of the various morphological orders of speech. We 

 cannot profess to criticise him here, though we note that he runs 



