852 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



on Imperial Expansion we are told of three " world crises " in our history 

 when we were confronted with momentous questions. The first was after 

 the Revolution. The second came through the growth of slavery. The 

 third is upon us now. " It is not the conquest of Spain, not the disposi- 

 tion of the spoils of victory which first concerns us. It is the spirit that 

 lies behind it. Shall our armies go where our institutions can not ? Shall 

 territorial expansion take the place of democratic freedom? Shall our 

 invasion of the Orient be merely an incident, an accident of a war of 

 knight-errantry, temporary and exceptional? Or is it to mark a new 

 policy the reversion from America to Europe, from democracy to im- 

 perialism ? " President Jordan has an answer to the question, What are 

 we to do in the shape affairs have assumed? The right thing would be 

 " to recognize the independence of the Philippines, under American pro- 

 tection, and to lend them our army and navy and our wisest counselors; 

 not our politicians, but our jurists, our teachers, with foresters, electri- 

 cians, manufacturers, mining engineers, and experts in the various in- 

 dustries. . . . The only sensible thing to do would be to pull out some dark 

 night and escape from the great problem of the Orient as suddenly and as 

 dramatically as we got into it." Yet President Jordan recognizes that 

 some great changes in our system are inevitable, and belong to the course 

 of natural progress. They must not be shirked, but should be met man- 

 fully, soberly, with open eyes. A paper on Colonial Lessons of Alaska 

 presents as an object lesson the muss we have made with colonial govern- 

 ment in that Territory. 



MR. A. H. Eeane's Man Past and Present * is a part fulfillment of a 

 promise held out in his Ethnology, the first volume of the Cambridge Geo- 

 graphical Series, that it might be followed by another dealing more sys- 

 tematically with the primary divisions of mankind. In it the " four 

 varietal divisions " of man over the globe are treated more in detail, with 

 the primary view of establishing their independent specialization in their 

 several geographical zones, and of elucidating the difficult questions asso- 

 ciated with the origins and interrelations of the chief subgroups. The 

 work consequently deals to a large extent with the prehistoric period, 

 when the peoples had already been fully constituted in their primeval 

 homes and had begun their subsequent developments and migratory move- 

 ments. The author has further sought to elucidate those general prin- 

 ciples which are concerned with the psychic unity, the social institutions, 

 and religious ideas of primitive and later peoples. The two principles, 

 already insisted upon in the Ethnology, of the specific unity of all existing 

 varieties of the human family and the dispersion of their generalized pre- 

 cursors over the whole world in Pleistocene times are borne in view 

 throughout. Subsequent to this dispersion, the four primary divisions of 

 man have each had its Pleistocene ancestor, from whom each has sprung 

 independently and divergently by continuous adaptation to their several 

 environments. Great light is believed to have been thrown on the char- 

 acter of the earliest men by the discovery of the Pithecanthropus erectus, 

 and this is supplemented as to the earliest acquirements by Dr. Noet- 

 ling's discovery, in 1894, of the works of Pliocene man in upper Burmah. 

 The deductions made from these discoveries strengthen the view Mr. Keane 

 has always advocated, that man began to spread over the globe after he 



* Man Past and Present. By A. H. Keane, F. R G. 8. (Cambridge Geographical Series). Cam- 

 bridge, England: At the University Press. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp.584. Price, $3. 



