148 



NATURE 



[June 16, 1887 



inherent defects of his method, his inadequate grasp of 

 the subject-matter, and his many shortcomings betrayed 

 at every step in the treatment of details. 



And first as to the method. A " social history of the 

 races of mankind," which, as he is careful to tell us, 

 eschews both anthropology and ethnology " in the 

 technical sense of these words," necessarily resolves itself 

 into a history of social progress, such as, for instance, is 

 presented in Mr. E. B. Tylor's " Primitive Culture," or 

 his " Researches into the Early History of Mankind." 

 But Mr. Featherman's work is in no sense a " history," 

 that is, a systematic and orderly treatise on the various 

 phases through which mankind has passed, or is passing, 

 in its upward development from the crude beginnings to 

 the highest aspects of human culture. Any such broad 

 and philosophic exposition of the subject is at once 

 excluded by his method, which consists of a disconnected 

 and more or less accurate account of the habits and 

 customs, social usages, language, religion, and tribal 

 or national organization of the various races and their 

 subdivisions, classified according to a system peculiar to 

 the author. Here we have an interminable series of 

 minute ethnographic pictures, involving endless repeti- 

 tions, without unity, without point, without those compre- 

 hensive generalizations which are essential to give 

 coherence to the whole, and which would flow of them- 

 selves from a systematic treatment. These disjecta 

 meinbra may to some extent supply the raw material, but 

 they never can " be considered as a manual of sociology," 

 as is claimed for them by the author. 



But owing largely to his inadequate grasp of the sub- 

 ject-matter, this raw material itself is often of a highly 

 unsatisfactory nature, and is so arranged as to be almost 

 worthless to the ordinary student, or in fact to any except 

 those few anthropologists who have the leisure and 

 knowledge needed to re-arrange it for themselves. When 

 Mr. Featherman passed from the " Nigritians " (African 

 Negroes) of the first to the " Melanesians " of this 

 second division, he was at once confronted by one of the 

 most tremendous difficulties in the whole range of anthro- 

 pology ; but of that difificulty, turning upon some rational 

 or at least working classification of the Oceanic peoples, 

 he seems to be absolutely unconscious. Hence in his 

 groupiiig of these peoples he has fallen into an abyss out 

 of which there is no redemption. It is all very well for 

 him to protest that " it is not the object of this work to 

 discuss contested ethnological questions " ; but he him- 

 self feels the necessity of some kind of grouping, in 

 establishing which he is fain to discuss some very 

 abstruse questions touching the origin of mankind, the 

 nature of species, the value of language as a racial test, 

 and the like. In general he professes to base his classifi- 

 cations "principally upon physical characteristics and 

 language" (" Nigritians," p. xv.), and this leads him to a 

 classification in the present volume, which confounds the 

 yellow and dark races, which identifies the Malays with 

 the Papuans, which ignores the presence not only of the 

 fair Indonesians, but of the pygmy Negritoes in the 

 Eastern Archipelago, and which, as shown on the very 

 title-page, recognizes in that region, and in fact in the 

 whole of Australasia, eastwards to Fiji, one stock only — 

 the " Melanesian." Of this stock there are two groups, 

 the " Papuo-Melanesians," and the " Malayo-Melanesians," 



which is like saying the " Black-Blacks " and the " Yellow- 

 Blacks," the latter comprising the Malay race in its widest 

 sense, the former all the rest — that is, the Melanesians 

 proper of Melanesia, the Papuans of New Guinea and 

 neighbouring islands, the natives of New Britain and 

 New Ireland, the Negritoes of the Philippines, of the 

 Malay Peninsula, and Andaman, the Nicobarese, the 

 Australians and Tasmanians. Certainly the Negritoes 

 are nowhere mentioned by name, being ignored as such ; 

 but they are nevertheless described as Papuans or 

 Melanesians under other names, such as Ayetas (in the 

 Philippines), Semangs (in the Malay Peninsula), Jand 

 Mincopies (in the Andaman Islands). On the last-men- 

 tioned he quotes somewhat disparagingly (p. 227) Mr. 

 E. H. Man, to whom we are indebted for the very best 

 memoir on this race. Yet even from him he might have 

 learnt that the Andamanese " are Negritoes, not Papuans " 

 (Journal of the Anthropological Institute, August 1882, 

 p. 70), just as [from the photographs taken by Mikluho- 

 Maclay, and Dr. A. B. Meyer, whom he does not quote, 

 he might have seen how profoundly the Negritoes of the 

 Malay Peninsula and the Philippines differ from the 

 Melanesians. This term Melanesian, which here re- 

 ceives such a prodigious extension, is nowhere very 

 clearly defined, and from its free application to the 

 yellow Malays, one is tempted to ask whether Mr. 

 Featherman is aware that it is Greek for " black." 



Of these Malays, again, it is dogmatically asserted 

 (p. 420) that they " did not originate in Asia," although 

 nearly all anthropologists regard them as true Asiatics, 

 a branch of the Mongolic stock, who migrated southwards 

 to the Archipelago while it possibly still formed part of 

 the mainland. But Mr. Featherman has a curious theory 

 about migrations, denying, in fact, " that either animals 

 or plants ever migrate." Hence, for him, the Malays can- 

 not be a branch of the Mongolic race, which they closely 

 resemble, but must be " an island people," a branch of 

 the Melanesians, whom they do not resemble at all. 

 With the Melanesians they constitute one of his six stock 

 races, which, although "zoologically varieties of the same 

 species," nevertheless originated in six different centres, 

 and are consequently not genetically connected. This 

 inference he doubtless seems to repudiate in the present 

 volume (p. viii.). But it is clearly and unequivocally 

 stated in the passage in the previous volume, which he 

 omits to quote in his reply to the critics who had, as he 

 now says, "erroneously if not purposely" affirmed this of 

 him. The omitted words run thus : " The peculiar physi- 

 cal characteristics and the habitats of the existing races 

 tend to show that they sprang from distinct individual 

 pairs, developed under a variety of surrounding condi- 

 tions in different parts of the world" (" Nigritians," xxii.). 

 In fact, the assumption is that like conditions inevitably 

 produce like results, that " the same causes must neces- 

 sarily produce the same effects under any given circum- 

 stances," hence that " plants and animals must have been 

 produced and evolved not by a single pair, but by an 

 indefinite number of pairs in different parts of the world " 

 (xiv.). It follows that crocodiles, for instance, have not 

 migrated, but have been independently evolved under like 

 surroundings in the Old and New Worlds ; and so with 

 the "six" human types, "zoologically varieties of the 

 same species," but nevertheless independently evolved 



