NoveMBER 19, 1896] 
NATURE 
Fl! 
with the metaphysics of physics : 
snakes of Iceland! 
Although I feel so strongly about the necessity for 
experimental or kindergarten methods of education being 
adopted, I do not wish to blame the author of this book. 
Teachers of mechanics will find it an excellent text- 
book. JOHN PERRY. 
Euclid, logic, and the 
THE FORMATION OF THE FAMILY. 
Die Formen der Familie und die Formen der Wirthschaft. 
Von Ernst Grosse. Pp. 245. (Freiburg and Leipzig : 
Mohr, 1896.) 
ORO ESD GROSSE, as appears from his preface, 
took up the anthropological problem of the develop- 
ment of the family, but soon judged the preliminary 
studies as yet available to be insufficient to enable him 
or any one else to carry out such a task. Therefore, as 
a contribution to the work, he set himself to examine the 
relation of the family systems of the world to one great 
factor of civilisation, namely the provision of subsistence. 
The task was judiciously chosen, and students will ac- 
Grosse makes a contribution of value to the clearing and 
ultimate solution of the problem. His planis to divide man- 
kind according to their “ Wirthschaft,” or economic life, 
into five classes—the lower and higher hunters, the herds- | 
men, and the lower and higher agriculturists. He then 
examines the correspondence between these stages of 
society and the different forms of family, class, and tribe. | 
At the outset this comparison tells against a state of 
matriarchal anarchy having ever prevailed among the 
human species. The low tribes subsisting by hunting, 
fishing, gathering wild fruits and digging roots, a con- 
dition which apparently represents that of primitive man, 
tend to live in separate small families under a rude 
patriarchal system extremely unlike promiscuity or 
communal marriage. 
evidence to fall into line with the increasing number of 
anthropologists who reject theories of primitive pro- 
miscuity. Among modern systems of social develop- 
ment founded on this chaotic basis, that of Morgan in 
his “Ancient Society” is here mentioned as the most 
eminent, with a remark which will somewhat surprise 
English readers, that it has given the American sociologist 
a place of honour among the Fathers of German Social 
Democracy (p. 3). In England it is doubtful whether 
the artificial social scheme of Morgan’s later years ever 
made converts to any serious extent, notwithstanding our 
high regard for his early work of observation and 
collection of facts. Considering that Morgan was an 
adopted Iroquois, living in a Seneca tribe for years as 
one of themselves, the statement here made (p. 152) is 
quite inadmissible, that his description of the Iroquois 
clan-system, which was the starting-point of his anthro- | 
pological work, was founded on the remarks of Father 
Lafitau in the last century. Passing on to the chapter 
in which Prof. Grosse deals with the lower agricultural 
tribes, we find an important addition to the theory of 
the maternal or matriarchal system. As hunting and 
herding belong to the men, so at first agriculture be- 
longed to the women, as it still does among the less 
civilised peoples. Out of the plant gathering, which is 
O.ET2, VOL. 55] 
Prof. Grosse is enabled by this | 
the business of savage woman, arose the invention of 
agriculture. On this reasonable hypothesis Prof. Grosse 
accounts for the unquestionable fact that among the 
Iroquois the women were owners of the soil they tilled and 
the crops they reaped, and that similar cases are still 
to be met with among the Balonda in South Africa 
and the Kocch in Bengal, always in connection with 
inheritance on the mother’s side. As Prof. Grosse 
reasons (p. 160), we have here a state of things out 
of which the maternal family, growing into the maternal 
clan, would naturally arise. The present reviewer 
has of late years advocated the opinion that the 
maternal form of society is mainly connected with 
| the husband not taking his wife to his own home, 
but living in her family, so that her side of the 
house naturally prevails (see ineteenth Century, July 
1896). It is obvious that wherever the land belongs 
to the women, this would especially tend to happen. 
As, however, the maternal family and clan appear 
already among hunting tribes who do not till the soil, 
it is plain that the full origin of the matriarchal system 
| cannot be sought in the modes of subsistence which 
knowledge that in his attempt to carry it out, Prof. | 
come within Prof. Grosse’s method of comparison. The 
same is true of the custom of exogamy, prevailing as it 
does among hunters, herdsmen, and tillers of the soil. Prof. 
Grosse’s incidental remarks on exogamy, as derived from 
aversion to marriages of near kin, need not be criticised 
here, the value of his work being rather in his systematic 
comparison between the economic and the social sides of 
human life, which leads him to the conclusion that in 
every form of culture that form of family organisation 
prevails which is adapted to economic relations and 
wants (p. 245). Readers who cannot accept so extreme 
a claim for the effect of these economic influences, will 
at least admit their great importance. 
Epwarp B. Tytor. 
OUR BOOK SHELF. 
Annales de Geographic, No. 23.— Bibliographic de Année 
1895. I. Partie générale ; Fi Partie régionale. Avec 
un Index alphabétique des auteurs, analysés, et cités. 
Pp. 288. (Paris: Colin, 1896.) 
THE problem of bibliography threatens to become the 
most absorbing practical question for all scientific 
workers. It is not yet quite the time to discuss a 
proposition to sweep away all previous records and begin 
afresh ; but the time has come for at least producing 
some sort of classified subject index to all branches of con- 
temporary work. The editors of the Avznales de 
Géographie, the foremost French journal of scientific 
geography, have brought out as their September number 
a bibliography of geography for 1895. This does not 
profess or attempt to be exhaustive, but the 1087 titles 
| recorded have been carefully selected, and nothing of the 
first order of importance seems to be omitted. Notes 
are appended to each title, not in the nature of criticism, 
but simply as an indication of the contents of each book 
or memoir ; and these notes are admirably done. They 
are the work of forty-nine contributors, and each Is signed. 
The division of the subject is primarily into general 
and regional geography. The former is divided into 
History of Geography; Mathematical Geography » Physical 
Geography, subdivided into geology (z.e. in its geographical 
aspect) and orography, climatology, botanical geography, 
zoological geography, oceanography, rivers and lakes ; 
and Political Geography, under the heads races, states 
