196 



NATURE 



{March 8, 1877 



this is borne out by what ho tells U3 of their unreasoning 

 '•' adherence to what they believe to be the text of these 

 old tales. ' I don't understand it, but the history says 

 so ; ' ' it is so ; ' ' the story says so ; ' was positively 

 affirmed again and again." This conservatism accounts 

 for the survival of so many pagan ideas and customs 

 among the people, among which the legends themselves 

 may be reckoned. The latter are believed like " the 

 histories of the Bible, or the ' Lives of the Saints.' In 

 fact, the problem of reconciling religion and science pre- 

 sents itself to the Basque mind in this strange guise — 

 how to reconcile these narratives with those of the Bible 

 and of the Church. The general solution is that they 

 happened before the time of which the Bible speaks, or 

 before Adam fell. They are lege zaharreko istorris^uak— 

 * histories of the ancient law ' — by which is apparently 

 meant the time before Christianity. * This happened, 

 sir, in the time when all animals and all things could 

 speak,' was said again and again by the narrators at the 

 commencement of their story ; '" a statement which 

 curiously fits in with a similar belief among the Bushmen. 

 Altogether Mr. Webster has produced a most interesting 

 book, and we hope that the welcome given to it may 

 induce him to make it but the first instalment of other 

 researches among the folk-lore of the Basques. 



A. H. Sayce 



OUR BOOK SHELF 



French Accent. By A. H. Keane. (Asher and Co., 

 1877.) 



This is an excellent and useful little pamphlet, in which 

 the author claims to have discovered and formulated for 

 the first time the laws which regulate French accentua- 

 tion. Putting aside the tonic accent which usually falls 

 on the last syllable of a word, and corresponds with the 

 toned syllable of the Latin or Italic original, we have 

 three accents : the acute, the grave, and the circumflex, 

 which Mr. Keane terms respectively the euphonic, the 

 ■grammatical, and the historical. The ciicumflex denotes 

 the loss of a sound, as do also the acute when on initial 

 e, and the grave when on final c. The grave is alone 

 employed grammatically to indicate the grammatical 

 changes of words, and Mr. Keane lays down the two rules 

 that " e followed by grammatical e mute, one consonant 

 intervening, takes the grave accent," and that " every un- 

 accented e followed by one consonant not final is mute." 

 Mr. Keane shows himself well acquainted with the latest 

 philological researches into the French language, and 

 both pupil and teacher will find great assistance from his 

 attempt to introduce law and order into the nature and 

 position of the French accents. However, he is not 

 altogether the first in the field, and it must be remem- 

 bered that the philological ignorance of those who have 

 stereotyped the use of the accents has caused it to be 

 somewhat arbitrary. The Neufchatel Bible of 1535 has 

 no accents, and the first to employ them regularly, though 

 somewhat capriciously, was Jacques Dubois, in the six- 

 teenth century. In "An Introductorie for to Learn 

 French trewly," published by Du Guez, in London, pro- 

 bably about 1560, the accents are written below the line. 



Etude sur la Degeneresccnce Pliysiolo^iqtie des Penplcs 

 Civilises. Par M. Tschouriloff. (Paris: Leroux, 1876.) 



This is a careful and conscientious discussion of a class 

 of statistics that have never been so carefully discussed 

 before, and have in consequence been interpreted by dif- 

 ferent writers in very diftcrent gcnses. '.'"here ar§ two 



questions, both of which M. Tschouriloff answers in the 

 affirmative, but which perhaps he does not always sepa- 

 rate as clearly as could be wished ; the one is whether 

 the French and other civihsed nations are deteriorating 

 in their physique, and the other whether their deteriora- 

 tion is due to the abstraction of able-bodied men to serve 

 and perish in the army. He has no doubt as to the 

 deterioration in France, Sweden, and Saxony; thus, in 

 the latter country, the number of men too infirm to serve 

 as conscripts has largely increased of late years ; in 

 1832-36, one- third of the men were rejected ; in 1850-54, 

 one-half. He quotes numerous medical authorities, whose 

 opinions are printed in the article, " Recrutement," in the 

 Dictionnai?'e Medical, to show the evil effects of industrial 

 occupation on the health of factory workmen, and alludes 

 to many other interesting facts of the same nature. But 

 the bulk of the work is occupied in tracing the effects of 

 the conscription on the French race. The' statistical ex- 

 amination of the returns of the medical examiners is of a 

 necessity very complex, allowances and corrections having 

 to be made on many grounds. Even so apparently simple 

 a problem as that of determining the amount of vigour 

 abstracted from a population by the absence of a given 

 fraction of them during a limited period, such as that of 

 the great war, is in reality very complicated, and requires 

 the free use of tables of mortality and of fecundity for 

 different ages. The upshot of the author's inquiries is to 

 show that the amount so abstracted is much greater than 

 appears at first sight to be the case. He therefore 

 ascribes a very seriously damaging effect to the vigour of 

 a population by the carrying on of great wars. It is truly 

 sad to read the statistical tables of the increase in France 

 of a long series of such hereditary diseases as scrofula, 

 hare-lip, varicose veins, paralysis, madness, and skin 

 maladies, due in large part to the propagation of the race 

 by men who had been rejected as too infirm to serve in 

 the army, and to so many of the healthy men having been 

 destroyed or displaced. This treatise will become a 

 standard work of reference, both in respect to its conclu- 

 sions and to the statistical operations by which they have 

 been attained. F. G. 



The Northern Barrier of India. A Popular Account of 

 the Jummoo and Kashmir Territories. By Frederic 

 Drew, With Map and Illustrations. (London : Stan- 

 ford, 1877.) 



This is a popular edition of Mr. Drew's valuable work on 

 Jummoo and Kashmir, noticed in Nature, vol. xii. p. 550. 

 That work was perhaps too formidable for the general 

 reader to undertake, and Mr, Drew has therefore done 

 well in selecting from it those parts likely to be of general 

 interest. The selection has been judiciously made, and 

 as the illustrations have been retained, and a map show- 

 ing the races as well as the physical features, the work 

 will be found of great value and interest by those who 

 hesitate to undertake the larger volume. It deserves a 

 wide circulation. 



Tlie T1V0 Americas; an Account of Sport and Travel. 

 By Major Sir Rose Lambert Price, Bart, With Illus- 

 trations. (London : Sampson Low, 1877.) 



We took up this book with little expectation of finding 

 much in it either edifying or interesting, and have been 

 most agreeably disappointed. The author, in one of Her 

 Majesty's ships, touched at various places on the east and 

 west coasts of South America, and although most of the 

 ground has already been gone over, he has the faculty of 

 seeing and describing the already known under new 

 aspects. He also visited Mexico, California, and the 

 Yosemite region. From beginning to end the narrative 

 is thoroughly entertaining, and even those who are well 

 read in American travel will find that Sir Rose Price is 

 able to tell them much tha^t is new. 



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