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NATURE 



[January 8, 1920 



Sir E. Brabrook has reprinted from the Anflio- 

 French Review for October an interesting article 

 entitled "The Anthropological Institutes of France and 

 the United Kingdom." The Societo d'Ethnologic de 

 Paris was founded in 1839, and the Ethnological Society 

 of London in 1844. In 1859 the Soci^t^ d'Anthro- 

 pologie de Paris was founded by Pierre Paul Broca, and 

 the Anthropological Society of London by James Hunt 

 in 1863. The London society had at first a chequered 

 career; the question of the plurality of races had a 

 political bearing, and some communications made to 

 the society on the characteristics of the negro race 

 were thought to overstep the line which restricts 

 scientinc societies in their choice and treatment of 

 subjects for discussion. The question was finally 

 solved bv the foundation of the Anthropological^ (now 

 Royal .Anthropological) Institute of Great Britain and 

 Ireland in 1870, which has since enjoyed a useful and 

 prosperous career, though it has never received a State 

 grant such as is enjoyed by its French sister, and has 

 not obtained adequate support from those interested in 

 the problems of our Indian and Colonial Empires. A 

 project has recently been initiated for the establish- 

 ment among the anthropologists of the .Mlied nations 

 . of a permanent central office of the International 

 Institute of Antjiropology, a scheme which, if framed 

 on satisfactory lines, will do much to co-ordinate the 

 work now carried on in Great Britain and on the Con- 

 tinent. Whether Germany will ultimately be invited 

 to share in this organisation depends on the future 

 conduct of that country. 



Prof. -A. Keith's important twenty-first Robert 

 Boyle lecture, entitled "Nationality and Race from 

 an Anthropologist's Point of View," has been pub- 

 lished by the Oxford University Press (price 2S. net). 

 Prof. Keith begins by classifying the progress of 

 human culture into two stages : that of natural and 

 artificial subsistence. " Man's great bowel, including 

 the cacum, appendix, and colon, which answered his 

 needs well when his dietary was coarse and uncooked, 

 is ill-contrived to deal with foods which are artificially 

 prepared and Jiighlv concentrated." The thesis which 

 he proposes is that "in our modern racial strifes and 

 national agitations we .see man's inherited tribal 

 instincts at war with his present-day conditions of 

 life." This he illustrates by a survey of racial and 

 national problems in the United States, Canada, 

 Spanish America, Australia and New Zealand, South 

 .Africa — where "the problems of race and of nationality 

 appear in a more acute and tangled form than any- 

 where else in the world " — and Europe, and bv a 

 reference to the Jewish question. As regards the 

 Irish problem. Prof. Keith remarks that, "except 

 for a trick of speech or a local mannerism, 

 the most expert anthropologist cannot tell Celt 

 from Saxon, or an Irishman from a Scotsman. 

 There are, to be sure, certain physical types which 

 prevail in one country more than in another; but I 

 do not know of any feature of the body or any trait 

 of the mind, or of any combination of features or 

 traits, .which will permit an expert, on surveying 

 groups of university students, to say this group is 

 from Scotland, that from Wales, the third from Ireland, 



NO. 2619, VOL. 104] 



and the fourth from England." Prof. Keith ends by a 

 strong plea that a knowledge of tribal and racial 

 spirit is essential for statesmen. 



Prof. W. Trelease discusses the bearing of the 

 distribution of some elements of the existing flora of 

 Central America and the Antilles on former land con- 

 nections in this area (Bull. Geol. Soc. Amer., No. 29, 

 pp. 649-56). The most important evidence is supplied 

 bv the genus .Agave, which includes the familiar 

 centurv plant. Its chief centre is Mexico, but it 

 ranges from .Arizona to the Isthmus of Panama, and 

 occurs also in tropical Florida and northern equatorial 

 .America. It is represented in the West Indies bv 

 about fifty endemic species comprising six distinct 

 types, and from their distribution in the islands the 

 author concludes that the genus was derived from the 

 mainland of Central .America at some late Tertiary 

 or early Quaternary time when islands and con- 

 tinents were continuous. Later they spread 

 through the chain over continuous land ; the con- 

 tinuity was broken by subsidence or faults when th; 

 very deep .'\negada Passage, which separates tb' 

 islands of St. Thomas and St. Croix, was formed, and 

 later subsidences have caused in succession the deeper 

 and lesser water gaps by which the .Antilles are divided 

 into groups successively more or less distinct in their 

 Agave flora. These conclusions harmonise with the 

 fact indicated by Eggers : that the greatest break 

 between the northern and southern elements in the 

 .Antillean flora coincides with the deepest, and pre- 

 sumably the oldest, break in the Antillean bridge, now 

 represented by the Anegada Passage. 



The geological work on the Western Front forms 

 the subject of an interesting paper by Mr. W. B. R. 

 King in the Geographical Journal for October 

 (vol. liv., No. 4). Mr. King was Geologist at General 

 Headquarters in France for more than three }ears. 

 His problems were mainly concerned with water- 

 supply, which at times presented much difficulty 'n 

 view of the amount required. The advice of the 

 geologist was also of great importance in mining and 

 tunnelling operations and in the construction of dug- 

 outs. 



We have received a copy of the Rain Map of .Aus- 

 tralia for the year 1918, published by the Common- 

 wealth Government. It gives the total rainfall 

 for the year and separate maps for each month. 

 Some small inset maps show the areas with rainfall 

 above the average in recent years. The year 1918 

 was in marked contrast to the two preceding years, 

 both of which had an unusual amount of precipitation. 

 In some respects it resembled 1915, when there was 

 .severe drought in the interior of New South Wales 

 and Queensland. Rainfall was good until the end 

 of February, when drought set in over the central and 

 eastern parts of .Australia. The westerly, or, as this 

 chart names it, the Antarctic, rainfall in the south 

 seems to have been fairly normal, but its influence 

 was restricted to the coasts in the south-west and 

 south-east. South Australia suffered from drought, 

 and throughout the wheat-belt there was a serious 

 deficiency in spring rains. .A cool spring, however, 

 minimised this want, and cereal crops were fairly good 



