854 



NATURE 



[Dfxemi; 



Facts and Fancies in Modern 

 Anthropology. 



(i) The Evolution and Progress of Mankind. Hy Prof. 



H. Klaatsch. Edited and Enlarged by Prof. A. 



Hcilhom. Translated by J. McCabe. Pp. 316. 

 1 : T. Fisher Unwin, Ltd., 1923.) 2$s. net. 

 (2; / /ir Uncial History of Man. By Prof. R. B. Dixon. 



Pp. xvi + 583 + 44 plates. (New York and London : 



Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923.) 255. net. 

 (3) Ancient Man in Britain. By D. A. Mackenzie. 



Pp. XV + 257 + 16 plates. (London, Glasgow and 



^Bombay : Blackic and Son, Ltd., 1922.) 12s. dd. 



net. 



THE three anthropologists the titles of whose works 

 are given above have approached problems 

 relating to the origin of human races and of their 

 civilisations by totally different routes, but all of them 

 have this in common : they have reached their respective 

 destinations by giving their imaginations the freest of 

 reins. No one who examines the frontispiece of the late 

 Prof. Hermann Klaatsch's book — his death in 1916 at 

 the age of fifty-two robbed German science of one of 

 its boldest exponents — would readily associate his burly 

 body and prize-ring face with fanciful speculations 

 regarding man's evolution. Nor do we expect Prof. 

 Roland B. Dixon, who holds the chair of anthropology 

 at Harvard University, to use a few measurements of 

 the skull as fairy wands wherewith to rear wonderful 

 anthropological castles in the air of long past ages. 

 His castles, we fear, like those which children build on 

 the sands, are doomed to disappear as the incoming 

 tide of reason flows over them — but of this, more anon. 

 There can be no doubt that Dr. Donald A. Mackenzie's 

 imagination is a part of himself ; he is a student of 

 Celtic literature, of Egyptian mythology, of primitive 

 folk-lore. He has that invaluable quality, denied to men 

 of strictly scientific training, of entering the primitive 

 human mind, seeing the world through its eyes, and 

 understanding its modes of reasoning. He has used 

 his gifts and training in drawing a word-picture of 

 ancient man in Britain and the sort of life he lived. 



(i) Prof. Klaatsch's book, finished and edited by his 

 friend. Prof. A. Heilbom, and translated into English 

 by Mr. Joseph McCabe, contains a popular account 

 of the opinions he had formed relating to the origin of 

 man and his mind ; to the beginnings of his speech, 

 his morals, his weapons, his home, and his societies. 

 However much one may resent the brusque way in 

 which this German professor has brushed aside the 

 facts and opinions of most of his contemporaries, and 

 the dogmatic way in which he has made assertion serve 

 the place of reason, yet his writings demand and deserve 

 our serious consideration. Klaatsch was trained under 

 NO. 2824, VOL. 112] 



Gegenbaur and became his assistant. He had Imh 

 assistant to Waldeyer, and from his boyhood had been a 

 close student of Darwin and of Huxley. He came into 

 European prominence towards the end of last century, 

 when the late Prof. Schwalbe of Strasbourg was giving 

 Neanderthal man the place originally assigned to him 

 by Dr. William King — that of a quite distinct species 

 of humanity, sharply marked off from all living 

 varieties of mankind. 



Klaatsch made the fossil remains of man— -parti' 1- 

 larly of Neanderthal man — his special study, and 

 published long and somewhat prolix monographs on 

 them. I Inn he took up the study of ancient stone 

 implements, and proceeded to sites in Belgium and 

 England to learn at first hand their nature and 

 antiquity. To help him to interpret the ways of 

 ancient man in Europe he set out in 1904 to live 

 in contact with the most primitive of living races 

 — the aborigines of Australia. H* ased to 



extol the fine gentlemanly qualities 01 mc alx)riginal 

 Australian ; he persuaded himself that he detected 

 Indo-Germanic elements in the aborigines' speech, and 

 took a particular delight in claiming the Australian 

 native as the ancestral type of the European I Much 

 of the book here reviewed is based on experience he 

 gained during the three years spent in Australia. He 

 returned in 1907 to fill the full chair of anatomy and 

 anthropolog)- in the University of Breslau, and to rush 

 about the continent of Europe to see the latest find of 

 fossil man. He was soon in the sand-pit of Mauer 

 when the Heidelberg jaw was found ; he was in the 

 Dordogne when his Swiss friend, Hauser, uncovered 

 fossil remains of man at Le Moustier and at Combe 

 Capelle; he went to Agram to see the remains dis- 

 covered at Krapina. With such a record we cannot 

 turn down lightly the opinions of this robust and 

 industrious German professor. 



Prof. Klaatsch was a vigorous exponent of evolution, 

 but as regards the origin of human races he held certain 

 peculiar opinions, to which he first gave expression 

 after making a detailed examination of the fossil re- 

 mains of Neanderthal man. He found that this extinct 

 species of mankind shared many minor characters with 

 the gorilla, and to account for the common heritage he 

 framed the conception that they were co-descendants 

 from an ancestral stock of ape-men. For reasons which 

 he never made quite clear, he linked the Negro race 

 on to the Gorilla-Neanderthal stem. He further sup- 

 posed, without a scrap of evidence, that these ancestral 

 ape-men were in our modem sense more man-like than 

 ape-like, and while the gorilla fell away towards ap)edom 

 as evolution went on, his more fortunate cousins — the 

 Negro and Neanderthal man — proceeded towards their 

 higher goals. He returned to the discarded idea of 



