August 3, 1882] 



NA TURE 



3*7 



sun would appear of a strongly bluish tint, thus confirm- 

 ing observations already made at Alleghany by other 

 methods. It may be added in this connection that re- 

 searches also there made show a like action in the solar 

 atmosphere, so that we are not only to understand that 

 there is a tendency in both atmospheres to absorb the 

 short waves more than the long ones (as the writer has 

 elsewhere stated), but that the solar photosphere (while 

 emitting radiations of all wave-lengths in greater quantity 

 than we receive them), is, through the immense prepon- 

 derance of the more refrangible rays before absorption, 

 essentially blue, and that white light is not "the sum of 

 all radiations," nor even of all visually recognisable ones, 

 but a composition of the small groups of special rays, 

 which, starting from this essentially blue sun, by virtue 

 of their large co-efficients of transmission, and by a kind 

 of survival of the fittest, have struggled through the solar 

 and terrestrial atmospheres, to us, while others of short 

 wave-length have failed on the way. This the Mount 

 Whitney observations, so far as regards the terrestrial 

 atmosphere at any rate, appear to prove. 



Doubtless a distinction is to be drawn between the 

 statements of fact and records of direct observation, 

 which will shortly appear in full in the Signal Service 

 publication, and the present inferences from them, for 

 which the writer alone should be held responsible. 



In view of the mass of observations on which they rest, 

 and the writer's endeavour to avoid any statement which 

 does not seem to him to express the result of careful and 

 repeated experiments, he hopes, however, that the results 

 to be given in the forthcoming volume will be found to 

 bear out these conclusions, and prove useful contributions 

 from the younger science of solar, to the elder one of 

 terrestrial meteorology. S. P. Langley 



Director of the Observatory, 

 Consulting Specialist U.S. Signal Service 



Alleghany Observatory, Alleghany, Penns)lvania, 

 July 13, 1882 



Asia. By A. H. Keane. Edited by Sir R. Temple. 

 (London: Edw. Stanford, 1882.) 



MR. KEANE'S encyclopaedic knowledge in matters 

 of philology and ethnology was never put to better 

 use than in the compilation of this account of Asia. 

 Considerable as is the size of the book, the information it 

 contains is compressed to the utmost ; every word is 

 pregnant with meaning, and could not be omitted without 

 injury to the reader. The physical geography, the fauna 

 and flora, the commerce and inhabitants of the vast con- 

 tinent of Asia, are all passed under review ; tribes and 

 dialects of which most of us have never even heard the 

 names are discoursed upon familiarly, and facts and 

 statistics bristle in every page. The latest authorities 

 have been everywhere consulted ; the geographical results 

 of the late Afghan war, for instance, having been laid 

 under contribution, and full use being made of the 

 Palestine Exploration Survey, not only of Palestine itself 

 but of the eastern side of the Jordan as well. It must 

 not be supposed, however, that Mr. Keane's work is dry 

 reading ; his literary ability has thrown an interest over 



the most matter-of-fact statistics and made us realise the 

 characteristics of the countries he describes or the towns 

 and populations he records. 



I need not point out the value to the Englishman of a 

 full and trustworthy compendium like this. As Sir Richard 

 Temple shows in his Preface to the book the interests of 

 England in Asia are enormous, and there is much truth 

 in the German assertion that so far as English power and 

 prestige are concerned we are no longer Great Britain but 

 Great India. But it is not only in India that English 

 influence is supreme ; our dependencies extend as far as 

 Hongkong, and our trade with Japan amounted in 1880 

 to over five millions of imports alone. To the student of 

 mankind the interest of Asia is greater than that of any 

 of the other continents of the world. Here was the first 

 home of the races who have chiefly influenced the course 

 of human progress ; here the early civilisations of Accad,. 

 of China, and of Phcenicia grew up and developed ; here 

 the great empires of antiquity rose one upon the other ; 

 and here was the primaeval source of those germs of 

 thought and art that have produced the philosophies, the 

 sciences, and the arts of our own day. It is among the 

 multitudinous tribes and nations of Asia, too, that we can 

 best study that variety of languages, of manners, and of 

 customs which have enabled the modern inquirer to lift a 

 little the veil that covers the first beginnings of civilisa- 

 tion, and there are even some who believe that the great 

 central plateau of Tibet before it was raised to its present 

 elevation was the prinueval cradle of mankind, the spot 

 where the anthropoid ape became the still speechless 

 man. It is possible that our young and therefore arrogant 

 western civilisation has yet much to learn from the old 

 culture of the east, and it is a question whether Sir R. 

 Temple is justified in saying that the Chinese are "im- 

 placably hostile to real progress " because they hate 

 " modern (European) progress." At all events the 

 example of Japan is not encouraging. 



It is a great pity that Mr. Keane's alphabetical list of 

 the races and languages of Asia had to be sacrificed to 

 the exigencies of space. The room] now occupied by a 

 number of very useless woodcuts could well have been- 

 given up to it. We must be thankful, however, for the 

 Ethnological and Philological Appendix which he has 

 added at the end. In this he sums up in a clear and 

 trenchant manner the chief facts at present known about 

 the ethnology of Asia. He pertinently points out the 

 great distinction that exists betuee n the different types of 

 race and language we find there. "All races are fertile 

 with one another, though perhaps in different degrees,'' 

 whereas the stock-languages of the continent "are true 

 species which refuse to amalgamate and thus form new 

 species, so that fresh varieties are developed only within 

 each " of them. The conclusion from this fact seems to 

 me to be that while the different races of mankind may 

 be referred to a single primitive pair, the different families. 

 of speech have branched off from independent centres. 

 Mr. Keane, however, still clings to the belief in a single 

 primaeval language or type of language, and rejects the 

 hypothesis that man was speechless when the leading 

 races were differentiated from one another. But the 

 argument on which he bases his rejection of the theory is 

 founded on a misconception ; language and race are not 

 synonymous terms, and those who hold the doctrine of 



