636 



NATURE 



[October 29, 1903 



the chairman of the committee, is a valuable summary of 

 the objects and methods of anthropometric work. 



The president's brief account of Grattan's craniometric 

 methods illustrates well the need for some such coordin- 

 ation of inquiry as the above-named committee proposes to 

 supply. Grattan's work in radial craniometry, and his very 

 ingenious craniometer, which is now in Prof. Symington's 

 keeping, remained unpublished and unknown until long 

 after similar methods had been rediscovered independently 

 by other workers. 



In general ethnography the papers were also few and of 

 various quality. Dr. W. H. R. Rivers 's researches on the 

 psychology and sociology of the Todas formed the subject 

 of a committee report, which was supplemented by two 

 papers on special points by the investigator. By the same 

 genealogical method as he employed in Torres Straits, Dr. 

 Rivers has succeeded in unravelling the complicated scheme 

 of kinship and marriage restrictions. This system is of the 

 kind known as " classificatory, " every male of an in- 

 dividual's clan being either his grandfather, father, brother, 

 son, or grandson, and so forth. Marriage is regulated by 

 kinship, being prohibited between the children of brothers 

 and between the children of sisters, but being customary 

 between children of brother and sister, and when a girl 

 becomes the wife of a boy she is understood to become also 

 the wife of his brothers. Infanticide certainly was prac- 

 tised formerly, but it is strenuously denied now. 



In a separate paper Dr. Rivers described the elaborate 

 ritual of the Toda dairy, in which the dairyman is the 

 priest, and the whole industry endued with a religious 

 <:haracter. 



The account of the ancient monuments of northern 

 Honduras, &c., presented by Dr. T. W. Gann, described a 

 large number of temples, pyramids, fortifications, under- 

 ground buildings, monoliths, and ancient enclosures for 

 various purposes, and also the pottery, implements, and 

 ornaments attributable to their builders ; with notes on the 

 burial customs and general civilisation of the ancient in- 

 habitants, and observations on the modern ethnography and 

 of the influence of European civilisation on the aborigines. 



Dr. J. E. Duerden communicated a note on a type of 

 wooden image which is widely distributed in cave deposits 

 in the West Indian islands. 



Miss Pullen Burry's account of the rapid evolution of the 

 Jamaica black gave a favourable picture of the social con- 

 dition of the negro population. Obeah-worship is practi- 

 cally extinct, peasant-proprietorship has inspired a taste for 

 agriculture, and life and property are safe even in the 

 remoter districts. 



Mr. C. Hill Tout and Mr. David Boyle sent papers on 

 the ethnology of the Siciutl Indians of British Columbia 

 and on the Canadian Indians of to-day, but the committee 

 on an ethnographical survey of Canada, of which they are 

 members, presented no report this year. 



An account of the legends of the Dieri and kindred tribes 

 -of Australia, by Messrs. A. W. Howitt and Otto Siebert, 

 contained much new and valuable matter, but did not lend 

 itself to presentation in full. It will be published shortly 

 in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute. 



Other papers, of a more or less ethnographical character, 

 raised questions of general importance, and provoked useful 

 discussion. 



Mr. W, Crooke's examination of the progress of Islam 

 in India and its causes laid stress on the successful 

 Mohammedan propaganda, which, together with the higher 

 social status of the caste-free Mohammedan, has resulted 

 in considerable conversion of Hindus to Islam, and also on 

 the circumstance that hereditary vigour, maturer marriage, 

 and more varied and invigorating diet tend to make the 

 Mohammedan individual more fertile and more long-lived 

 than the Hindu. 



Prof. R. S. Conway, in discussing the ethnology of early 

 Italy and its linguistic relations with that of Britain, dealt 

 almost wholly with the linguistic evidence of early Italian 

 place- and tribe-names, recurring thus, after a considerable 

 interval, to a department of anthropological inquiry which 

 has been overmuch neglected in this section. He dis- 

 tinguished two main sets of ethnics, one ending in -CO 

 the other in -NO. The occurrence of ethnics in -CINO 

 {i.e. -NO superimposed upon -CO) shows that the -NO 

 stratum is the later, and its geographical distribution leads 

 Prof. Cqnway to connect it with the irruption of the 

 NO. 1774, VOL. 68] 



northern group of peoples into Peninsular Italy, who had 

 knowledge of iron and buried their dead. To these, con- 

 trary to the view of Mommsen and his school. Prof. Conway 

 holds that the Romani, or at all events their aristocracy, 

 belonged, and he explains the peculiar geographical dis- 

 tribution of the Italic dialects of Umbria and the Volscian 

 area by the probable effects of this northern invasion, co- 

 inciding, as he supposes, in point of time with the 

 Tyrrhenian colonisation of Etruria. He compares the 

 linguistic contrasts which separate the -CO and -NO folk 

 in Italy with those which distinguish Goidels and Brythons 

 in north-western Europe, and suggests that the westward 

 and the southward movements which can be traced are to 

 be referred to the same centre of disturbance. 



Mr. D. MacRitchie argued, from the survival of the use 

 of skin-covered canoes in N.W. Europe, to the existence of 

 a racial type of Mongoloid E^'iropeans. It should be noted, 

 however, that one might sit in a skin-covered canoe without 

 having Mongoloid physique. 



In contrast with the somewhat meagre output in ethno- 

 graphy, the archaeological communications were unusually 

 numerous and attractive. 



Mr. Llewellyn Treacher's paper on the occurrence of 

 stone implements in the Thames Valley between Reading 

 and Maidenhead (read also in Section C), and Mrs. Stopes's 

 account of her late husband's collections from implement- 

 iferous gravels at Swanscombe, in Kent, summarised much 

 useful work on limited areas. Mrs. Stopes's other paper, 

 on saw-edged palaeoliths, submitted a wide induction from 

 copious data; so copious and varied, indeed, that the pre- 

 liminary question intruded itself whether nature, as well 

 as man, had not some hand in their preparation. 



Mr. Annandale was on safer ground in his collection of 

 survivals of primitive implements in the Faroes and Ice- 

 land, and exhibited a great variety of types. Their distri- 

 bution is by no means uniform, those found in the Faroes 

 being generally absent from Iceland, and vice versd. Mr. 

 Annandale suggests that this may be due to differences in 

 the history of the original settlers in the two areas. 



A paper by Mr. G. Clinch described the megalithic monu- 

 ment of Coldrum, in Kent, which comprise a central crom- 

 lech, without capstone, but with a double chamber, and an 

 irregular line of large blocks of stone on the western side, 

 with traces of a tumulus. No excavation has been 

 attempted as yet, and the monument is partly destroyed 

 by a cart-way, but the author compares it with a larger 

 megalithic structure, of Neolithic date, at Sievern, in 

 Hanover, and concludes in favour of a late Neolithic date 

 for Coldrum. He lays stress on points of similarity which 

 he detects between Coldrum and Stonehenge. Discussion 

 and criticism were impaired in this, as in some other cases, 

 by the absence of the author. 



Mr. H. Balfour gave an account of a model of the Arbor 

 Low stone circle, which had been prepared by Mr. H. St. G. 

 Gray as the outcome of the recent excavation of this monu- 

 ment by a committee of the Association. It would be well 

 if every such excavation were so conducted as to permit a 

 similar reproduction for convenient reference hereafter. 



Prof. W. Ridgeway offered a suggestive theory of the 

 origin of jewellery, namely, that mankind was led to wear 

 such objects by magic rather than by aesthetic consider- 

 ations. 



All peoples value for magical purposes small stones of 

 peculiar form or colour long before they can wear them as 

 ornaments ; e.g. Australians and tribes of New Guinea use 

 crystals for rain-making, although they cannot bore them. 

 So, in Greece, the crystal was used to light sacrificial fire, 

 and was so employed in the Church down to the fifteenth 

 century. The Egyptians under the twelfth dynasty used it 

 largely, piercing it along its axis. From this bead came 

 the artificial cylindrical beads made later by the Egyptian, 

 from which modern cylindrical glass beads are descended. 

 The beryl, a natural hexagonal prism, lent itself still more 

 readily to the same form, and the cylinders found without 

 any engraving on the wrists of the dead in early Babylonian 

 graves had a similar origin. The Orphic Lithica gives 

 a' clear account of the special virtue of each stone, and it 

 is plain, that they acted chiefly by sympathetic magic. The 

 Greeks and Asiatics used stones primarily as amulets, and 

 to enhance the natural power of the stone a device was cut 

 on it. The use of the stone for sealing was simply 

 secondary, and may haye arisen first for sacred purposes. 



