April 29, 1920] 



NATURE 



255 



Man: Past and Present. 

 Man: Past and Present. By A. H. Keane. Re- 

 vised, and largely re-written, by A. Kings- 

 ton Quiggin and A. C. Haddon. Pp. xi + 

 582 + xvi plates. (Cambridge : At the Univer- 

 sity Press, 1920.) Price 365. net. 

 IT is scarcely necessary to extol the virtues of 

 the late Prof. A. H. Keane 's invaluable compi- 

 lation of data relating to the races of mankind and 

 their customs (see Nature, June 8, 1899, p. 121), 

 for it has been the vade mecum of almost every 

 working ethnologist for more than twenty years. 

 If the authors of the new edition had a task of 

 exceptional difficulty in practically re-writing a 

 work of so encyclopaedic a nature they also had 

 a great opportunity. Moreover, Mrs. Kingston 

 Quiggin and Dr. Haddon had exceptional, if not 

 unique, qualifications for making the most of their 

 chance. But they have contented themselves with 

 pouring their new wine into Keane 's old bottles. 

 Even so glaring an anachronism as Keane 's classi- 

 fication of the races of mankind and the use of 

 the unpardonable term "Caucasian," with many 

 of its unfortunate implications, have been retained. 

 They have made a digest of the modern litera- 

 ture of ethnology that will be extremely useful to 

 the expert, who knows what to select and what to 

 reject, but utterly bewildering to the student and 

 the general reader, who expect some sort of con- 

 sistency and some leading idea to bind together 

 such vast masses of data as are presented to 

 them in this book. Instead of this they will find 

 an excellent series of extracts from a host of 

 authors without any serious attempt to create a 

 consistent story or to explain the wide discrep- 

 ancies in their interpretations of the facts. 



Although the authors direct attention (pp. 351- 

 53) to the fact that fatal objections have been 

 made to the fashionable speculation of the in- 

 dependent origin of cultures, throughout the rest 

 of the book they ignore this warning and adopt 

 an extreme attitude in flagrant opposition to the 

 doctrine of diffusion. Take, for example, the dog- 

 matic stiatement on p. 23 : — " In fact, we know 

 for certain that such an independent Copper Age 

 was developed not only in the region of the Great 

 Lakes of North America, but also amongst the 

 Bantu peoples of Katanga and other parts of Cen- 

 tral Africa " : the researches of one of Dr. 

 Haddon 's own pupils, Mr. W. J. Perry, have 

 shown this claim to be totally unfounded. Copper 

 was not used in either of these places until im- 

 migrants who had already become acquainted with 

 the economic value of the metal elsewhere had 

 made their way into these territories and dis- 

 covered the new sources of supply. 

 NO. 2635, VOL. 105] 



This sort of fallacy runs through the whole 

 book, and will be a repeated source of confusion 

 to the thoughtful student. What, for example, 

 will he think of the statement on p. 465: "The 

 idea of an independent evolution of Western 

 [European] culture is steadily gaining ground," 

 after reading a hundred pages earlier that the 

 opposite tendency is now strongly asserting itself? 

 The late Prof. Keane was a strong supporter 

 of the speculation of the independent origin of cul- 

 ture, and at times became almost fanatical in giv- 

 ing expression to his devotion to the fashionable 

 craze. But the authors of the present edition, in 

 spite of their pretence of impartiality, go further 

 than the original author. The latter was not 

 always consistent. While he poured scorn upon 

 the whole theory of the diffusion of culture and 

 quoted with child-like gusto the worst extrava- 

 gances of Brinton's and J. W. Powell's denials 

 of the possibility of such a spread of civilisation 

 as everyone knows to be happening at the present 

 time, he frankly and fully adopted it as the 

 explanation of the ancient Rhodesian monuments 

 at Zimbabwe. But the authors of the present 

 edition -reject Keane's solution of the Zimbabwe 

 problem, and adopt Dr. Randall-Maclver's dis- 

 credited speculations. Thus we are told that 

 "exploration in 1905 dispelled the romance 

 hitherto connected with the * temples ' and pro- 

 duced evidence to show that they were not earlier 

 in date than the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries 

 [sic\ and were of native construction " (p. 89). Dr. 

 Haddon does not enlighten his readers as to how 

 the discovery of a piece of medieval Chinese pot- 

 tery in one of the altogether subsidiary buildings 

 at Zimbabwe can prove that the great buildings 

 were built by negroes not earlier than the four- 

 teenth century. The discovery of a piece of 

 willow-pattern plate in the foundation of a house 

 at, say, Bristol would not prove that the Roman 

 buildings at Bath were erected by Englishmen in 

 the nineteenth century ! Yet this is the sort of 

 argument which is naively borrowed by Dr. 

 Haddon, who is well aware of the multitude of 

 data entirely fatal to it. 



The authors, in fact, seem to have accepted 

 without discrimination anything that has recently 

 appeared in print, and not tested it in the light 

 of their own knowledge. Thus they have repro- 

 duced without comment or criticism some of the 

 least excusable fallacies of current ethnological 

 literature. For example, in their discussion of 

 the origin of Chinese civilisation (p. 207) they 

 confuse race and culture. They are giving the 

 reasons for not deriving the people of China from 

 south-western Asia, when they are really discuss- 

 ing the origin of Chinese civilisation. Writers 



