June 15, 1911] 



NATURE 



513 



reported to have a poisonous effect upon the blood." 

 His views on cures for snake-bite are those of a 

 Rip Van Winkle ; what we want is — 



"not so much a remedy which will absorb and 

 neutralise the poison, as a means by which this 

 neutraliser may be enabled to reach the poison, or a 

 treatment for keeping up the vitality of a patient 

 until the poison becomes absorbed by the system." 



In short, he makes the words "absorbed'' and 

 " absorbent " as odious as the word " occupy " was to 

 Doll Tearsheet. 



In the chapter on "hunting" snakes, our author is 

 as coherent and profound as honest Dogberry him- 

 self. The " necessary point " in this hunting to be 

 borne in mind is that " it is less important to go 

 where there are a great many snakes than to go 

 where the nature of the country facilitates seeing and 

 catching of them." So also, "a cobra is best obtained 

 by digging one out of an ant-heap or hole," but "the 

 cobra must have been seen to enter the hole a short 

 time before," for all is vanity. As to smoking a 

 snake out, "it takes a lot of smoke to have any 

 effect on a snake, owing to the latter's lung capacity." 

 The snake has only one lung, but that, like the one eye 

 of Mr. Midshipman Easy's friend, the master's mate, 

 is of prodigious power. When the author tried 

 smoke " it was so suffocating and so blinding that 

 the capture of the snakes was extremely diflficult and 

 somewhat risky " ; little wonder that he regards it 

 as "an unsatisfactory proceeding." The way to com- 

 prehend vagrom pythons "can only be learnt by 

 practice " ; but if the python be asleep " it can often 

 be captured without any trouble." 



Touchstone and his shepherd could not improve the 

 chapter on snakes in captivity. 



"When feeding a tame python great care has to be 

 exercised lest the snake should seize your hand in 

 mistake for a rat, especially if your hand has just 

 been in contact with the latter." 



Truly it requires the careful experiments of a 

 natural philosopher to discover 



" that cold is not so injurious to these reptiles as is 

 commonly believed, but that it is the infrequency of 

 the sun's rays that renders a climate such as that 

 of England unsuitable for serpents." 



Finally, we would commend this weighty precept : 



"Those who are desirous of keeping a serpentarium 

 of live snakes should study as much as possible the 

 conditions under which the various snakes live when 

 in the wild state," 



otherwise they labour in vain on their " serpentarium." 



THE METHODS OF ANTHROPOLOGY. 



The Racial Anatomy of the Philippine Islanders. 

 Introducing New Methods of Anthropology. By 

 Prof. R. B. Bean, Pp. 236 + 25 photographs. 

 (Philadelphia and London : J. B. Lippincott Com- 

 pany, 1910.) 

 THE most recent literature dealing with the study 

 of man's physical characters reveals manifold 

 signs of a widespread revolt against the domination 

 of mere anthropometry in this field of research. It 

 NO. 2172, VOL. 86] 



is often urged that no kind of investigation can claim 

 the title "e^act," or even be called "science," unless 

 it deals with evidence that can be expressed in figures 

 or mathematical symbols. But in all biological in- 

 quiries a primary sorting of the material is an indis- 

 pensable preliminary to its mathematical treatment, 

 and until the obviously heterogeneous elements in any 

 series have been sifted, one species of material being 

 separated from another, and males distinguished from 

 females, any attempt to deal statistically with 

 measurements of such unsorted material can produce 

 only confusing and misleading conclusions. 



The most urgent need in anthropology at the pre- 

 sent time is the determination of those characters of 

 the human body and its parts, which have definite 

 significance as indications of race, and the investiga- 

 tion of the exact value and meaning of such traits, 

 and of the bond of union between them and other 

 distinctive characters, which are associated in groups 

 in different individuals. 



The comparative sterility of recent work in anthro- 

 pology, so far as the determination of racial char- 

 acters in series of skeletons is concerned, is due 

 mainly to the common neglect of such preliminary 

 studies and the immediate resort to blindly-made 

 measurements as the sole means of investigation. 

 It is the great merit of Sergi's work that he insisted 

 on this return to the ordinary methods of zoological 

 investigation in dealing with human remains, and by 

 the use of such methods, crude and unsatisfactory as 

 some of them undoubtedly are, he has been able to 

 recover a great deal of true history of man's 

 movements, and information concerning his affini- 

 ties. 



ProL Bean's interesting book on the people of the 

 Philippine Islands claims the consideration of the 

 anthropologist, not so much for what he has accom- 

 plished, as from the fact that it is an attempt to 

 direct the investigation of racial anatomy into its 

 proper channel, for in it he has attempted to dis- 

 criminate between the peculiarities of conformation 

 of the external ear in the different racial elements in 

 the Philippines, and use them as indices of race in 

 precisely the same manner as the zoologist or "the 

 man in the street" would distinguish a cat from a 

 dog, even if these animals were of precisely the same 

 size and quite irrespective of the measurements of 

 their crania or other bones. 



Dr. Bean has correlated the various types of ear 

 with a large series of other physical characters, a? 

 well as with stature, proportion of limbs and trunK 

 and head; and, like others who have undertake^ 

 similar investigations upon man or other living 

 creatures, he finds that "the method of grouping 

 reveajls types that apparently represent character- 

 complexes composed of unit characters," which "hang 

 together in heredity or break up when crossed with 

 other character-complexes." 



Throughout the book the author is ever on the 

 alert to detect Mendelian phenomena, and in chapter 

 X. he builds up a scheme for the explanation of 

 heredity in human mixtures. 



The most unfortunate feature of Dr. Bean's sug- 



