524 



NATURE 



[March 30, 1893 



steppes. As the soil of the forests differs in character 

 from that of the tchernozeme the author and M. 

 Gheorgievsky were able to prove the greater extent formerly of 

 the Poltava forests. — The second section deals with prehistoric 

 archaeology. In a paper entitled comparison of the primitive 

 industries of France and Asia, G. Chauvet discusses the 

 question "Can one establish general divisions, ap- 

 plicable to both Western Europe and Asia, for prehistoric 

 times and especially for the palaeolithic period?" The general 

 progress of the industrial arts has been the same in Asia and in 

 Europe during prehistoric times, but how far these epochs 

 were synchronous is unknown. In order to have terms for com- 

 parison it is necessary to have a " fixed base" ; such a base is 

 afforded by the glacial phenomena. He concludes by urging that 

 the great engineering works which are now progressing in Asia 

 afford opportunities for obtaining information on these problems 

 which should not be neglected. — Lubor Niederle (of Prague) 

 calls attention to the latest results of prehistoric archeology 

 in Bohemia, and its relations with Eastern Europe, and arrives 

 at the conclusion that the Slavs arrived in Bohemia earlier than 

 is admitted by historians. He believes that the Slavs, like the 

 Germans and Gauls, were originally dolichocephalic, and of a 

 blonde complexion. — The other papers in this section are short, 

 two of them being on nephrite. — The third section is confined 

 to tumuli and encampments (Kourganes et goroditchtsches). — 

 A, Spitzine reports on the bone-encampments in the north of 

 Russia. — P. Krotov comes to the following conclusions in his 

 paper on the layers of stone implements in the district of 

 laransk, government of Viatka ; the stone implements of the 

 district of laransk do not belong to the true stone age, but to 

 the epoch of the encampments and other ancient dwellings of 

 the Finns, who made use of implements of stone and bone, 

 along with utensils in iron and bronze. During this period of 

 the life of the Finns, elements of a more advanced civilization 

 penetrated into their country, coming from the centres of civili- 

 zation of eastern Russia; flint and bone implements being replaced 

 by iron tools. — B. Peredolsky has a paper on the " jalnik " 

 <,necropolis) of lurievo, in the district of Borowitchi, government 

 of Novgorod." — The first paper in the Anthropological Section 

 is by Topinard on race in anthropology, in which he asserts, (i) 

 On no part of the surface of the globe can one discover a popula- 

 tion entirely free from mixture, and presenting only a single type ; 

 (2) that the anthropological materials on which we work, and 

 from which we extract the double notion of the type to begin 

 with, and of its continuity in time, are only peoples ; (3) that 

 if the first factor, the type, is accessible with labour, the second, 

 its permanence in time, is only a conjecture which it is im- 

 possible to demonstrate ; (4) that in consequence the notion of 

 race in the two factors, and especially in the latter, is only a 

 subjective notion, a mental conception, peoples and their 

 historic elements being the only objective realities. Later on 

 he says : " In order to show how in Europe, for example, the 

 question of nationalities is foreign to that of races, or even of 

 the constituent elements of peoples, one need but remember 

 that three or four races (using the word conditionally) only are 

 fundamentally concerned in the formation of the numerous 

 peoples which at the present time are distributed from north 

 to south, and from east to west. The races are the whites, 

 the brachycephals, and the browns. They are found every- 

 where, with only here and there some secondary additions. Their 

 proportions alone vary. To the north there are more blondes ; 

 in the centre, from the Urals to Portugal, the brachycephals 

 ■dominate ; to the south, around the Mediterranean, the browns 

 are in the majority. If two peoples agree in certain characters 

 it does not follow that they have the same nationality. Kollniann, 

 in an illustrated paper on the human races of Europe and the 

 Aryan question, argues that it is necessary to distinguish at least 

 four different types in Europe (the Dolichocephalic leptoprosopes 

 and chamcEprosopes and the Brachycephalic leptoprosopes and 

 ^:havia:prosopes) which have continued, without any doubt, since 

 the neolithic period ; that the intellectual European culture 

 is a common product of these types. — In his paper on 

 the weight of the brain among several peoples of the 

 Caucasus, Dr. N. Giltchenko gives valuable data on fifty- 

 seven subjects. Anoutchine has a paper entitled, "On 

 Ancient, Artificially Deformed Skulls found in Russia." — The 

 last section is devoted to Prehistoric Ethnography. In his 

 contributions to the prehistoric ethnography of Central and 

 North-East Russia, J. Smirnov concludes that the linguistic 



NO. 1222, VOL. 47] 



facts permit the supposition that only a part of the re- 

 mains of the neolithic period of Central Russia can belong 

 to the Finns, The antiquity of sepultures can be determined, 

 besides other ways, by the animal bones deposited with the 

 dead. The N.-S. position of the skeleton may be regarded 

 in Central Russia as one of the indices of ancient Finnish 

 sepultures. To the category of the monuments of prehistoric 

 epochs belong geographical names. The place-names of 

 northern and central Russia prove that its pre- or proto- 

 historic population has been more homogeneous to the 

 east, in the region of the Permiens and Ougriens, and 

 more mixed to the west. — N. Troitzky has a very interesting 

 paper on vestiges of paganism in the region situated 

 between the upper courses of the Oka and of the Don. 

 Fire, tree, and stone cults persist, but modified by Christianity. 

 — E. Chantre has a project for reform in the nomenclature of 

 the peoples of Asia " ; and A. Ivanovsky, some information 

 upon the questions : (i) of the simultaneous employment of 

 sepulture and incineration ; and (2) of the stone statues called 

 "Kamennya baby."^The last is the most important communi- 

 cation, "Which is the most ancient race in Russia?" by Prof. 

 A, Bogdanov, of Moscow. He finds that the most ancient skulls 

 are dolichocephalic. In passing to the more modern tombs since 

 the fifteenth century, we see a diminution of the quantity of 

 dolichocephals and the preponderance of brachycephals. In the 

 ancient tombs of the government of St, Petersburg, as well as in 

 some districts of Novgorod, we meet from the stone age 

 onwards skulls of a type quite distinct from those character- 

 istic of the tumuli {kourganes) of Central Russia. 

 From Moscow eastward, and as far as the Urals 

 and Siberia (Tobolsk), we find the tumuli of the 

 brachycephals. In the governments of Moscow, Smolensk, 

 Riasan, and Don, we have only in some localities the series of 

 the dolichocephals, and in others a kind of mixture of characters ; 

 in these localities, more than in the others, mixture was possible, 

 since they are found either on the great routes of migrations, or 

 at the limit of the distribution of different races. In the tombs 

 called " Scythian " the majority of the skulls quite resemble the 

 dolichocephalic tumuli-population of Central Russia. One finds 

 only occasionally Mongoloid skulls in the tumuli of Central 

 Russia, and in the tombs of Southern Russia ; whilst in the 

 tumuli of Tobolsk, and of the Uralian countries they abound 

 and often predominate. The territory of this dolichocephalic 

 leptoprosopic primitive people is very distinctly limited to the 

 north, east, and south by the tumuli, with a population quite 

 brachycephalic, or presenting this type in preponderance. There 

 is no south-west limit. In Galicia, north and south Germany, 

 and Sweden we meet with the same type in the ancient tombs 

 as in those of Central and Southern Russia. There are true 

 primitive dolichocephalic chamreprosops in Asia among the Mon- 

 golians, but not in Europe. Kollmann's European types appear 

 to be the result of mixture with brachycephals, or of what 

 Virchowcalls " pathological races." Dolichocephalism is more 

 and more diminishing in Europe. The larger and broader heads 

 of the civilized classes should be attributed to other causes than 

 merely to mixture. 



A. C. H. 



SCIENTIFIC SERIALS. 



The Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science for January, 

 1893, contains : — On the relationships and role of the Archo- 

 plasm during mitosis in the larval salamander, by John E. S. 

 Moore (plate xxi.). — On the occurrence of embryonic fission in 

 cyclostomatous polyzoa, by Sidney F, Harmer (plates xxii.- 

 xxiv.). The extraordinary phenomena described in detail in 

 this paper were announced in brief to the Cambridge Philo- 

 sophical Society a couple of years ago. The completed investi- 

 gations of the author indicate in the clearest way that the young 

 larvae of Crisia ramosa are produced as buds from an embryonic 

 mass of ceils found in the young ovicell. "At the end of 

 segmentation the embryo consists of a small mass of undifferen- 

 tiated cells, lying near the distal end of the follicle, which has 

 increased largely in size, and now forms a spherical knob pro- 

 jecting freely into the interior of a spacious tentacle sheath ; " 

 after a time " the embryo, although remaining a solid mass 



