'352 NATURAL SCIENCE. December, 



France and England, and is therefore not by any means a solitary 

 ■test of unlettered man. 



The splendid figures of the Dacians, conquered by Trajan, give 

 a view of the noble air and expression of man before writing ia that 

 region. 



Egypt, as Professor Petrie has done so much to show, presents 

 us with an epitome of the civilisation of unlettered man in the figures 

 of various objects used as hieroglyphs, since they must have pre- 

 ceded the use of writing. These show that in that stage man had 

 fully developed weapons, tools, boats, ornaments, and architecture. 



Thus the civilisation, art, ability, and conceptions of man before 

 writing are quite on a level with what he used afterwards. Writing 

 is like railways and telegraphs, one of the tools which we must use 

 to hold our place with others ; but it is of no virtue to the mind in 

 itself. And by relying on it too much we lose that education of the 

 senses, and the growth of the mind through the senses, which is the 

 most really important for us. 



Was it, we wonder, this lecture, that suggested to Dr. W. Essex 

 Wynter his recent address to the students at Middlesex Hospital, in 

 which he advocated a study of concrete facts rather than of books ? 

 At any rate, we ourselves as we heard it were profoundly impressed 

 with the truth of those remarks as applied to the study of science. 

 The beginner, we fear, is often expected to know what Professor X., 

 Dr. Y., and Mr. Z. think about, say, Balanoglossiis, though his own 

 practical acquaintance with the animal remain of the most meagre 

 description. Even when practical work is insisted upon, it is accom- 

 plished with the aid of manuals, text-books, diagrams, and pretty 

 pictures. Originality of observation, nay, the very power of inde- 

 pendent observation, is thus checked. Give a man an object, whether 

 a tea-plant or a tea-cup, and make him describe it ; take him to a 

 quarry, and make him measure, sketch, collect, note, and label ; all 

 this without books, without names, without the obscuring jargon of 

 the " ologies," and you will have done more for his training as a 

 scientific naturalist than by a month of lectures on the ancestry of the 

 Chordata. 



Mycen^an Culture. 

 In his presidential address to Section H, entitled " 'The Eastern 

 Question ' in Anthropology," Mr. Arthur Evans alluded to the 

 continuity of race from Palaeolithic times, as evidenced by the remains 

 in the Baousse Rousse Caves, through Neolithic skeletons of the same 

 Ligurian coast, down to the historical Ligurian type. Thus the 

 ' Mediterranean Race ' finds its first record in the West, and may date 

 from the time when the land bridges of Eurafrica were still unbroken. 

 The continuity of cranial type has been emphasised by Professor 

 Sergi, and Salomon Reinach has brilliantly advocated the indigenous 

 nature of the early European civilisation. The earlier civilisation of 



