March 9, 1871] 
NATURE 
305 

we want him to tell us their precise significance in that 
particular connection. This, indeed, and a very general 
absence of dates, deprives many of his facts of some 
portion at least of their intrinsic value. Occasionally, 
too, we come across a statement which we want verified, 
as, for instance, at p. 283, where he tells us “it is said 
that among the Ancient Britons money was habitually 
lent on what may strictly be called ‘ post-obits,’ promises, 
to pay in another world.” We own that we should like 
to see the authority for the prevalence of so singular a 
commercial transaction among our grandfathers. So far 
as we know, the Bonzes of Japan, and not the early Britons 
are the real culprits. A letter from a Jesuit father in 
Japan, dated March 1565, printed in Maffei’s collection 
(B. iv. 2), tells how certain Bonzes were in the habit of 
borrowing money: to be repaid with interest in another 
life, and giving their creditors I. O. U.’s (syngraphas) for 
post mortem presentation. 
After all, however, Sir J. Lubbock’s work is the com- 
pletest summary of barbaric life that we possess. It does 
not profess to be exhaustive. It is designed rather as a 
breaking of the ground for further research in a direction 
precisely opposite to the “high réorz road,” on which 
theorists about the origin of civilisation have walked so 
long towards nowhere, discoursing prettily about the 
family being the first of human institutions, language 
being the perfect instrument of primeval thought, and so 
forth. In this respect, as well as in being a handbook of 
facts nowhere else collected together, it is undoubtedly a 
most useful contribution to contemporary literature. Its 
main value, however, consists in what we have only lately 
found a word for,—its “ suggestiveness.” Very few, even 
of the “cultured classes,” at all realise the profound and 
abject barbarism of primeval antiquity. We can only 
guess darkly at the life of those wild ancestors of our 
race who fashioned and wielded the flint tools of the drift 
while yet the Thames was tributary to the Rhine,—how 
they skurried to their caves or burrows from the wolf, the 
bear, and the tiger, kept watch on the rhinoceros snorting 
in the shallows, or trembled as the mammoth herds 
crashed through the jungle. What were the relations 
among them of man to man, of man to woman? Was 
the one generally either the slayer or the victim,—the 
other either the temporary slave of an animal lust or the 
material of a fireless feast? Had they language beyond 
the scream of terror or pain, the shriek of triumph, the chat- 
tering of menace, the muttered mumbling of gratified glut- 
tony? Who can tell? We know only that between the 
lowest savages of to-day and their earliest ancestors lies an 
interval of years far beyond the limit of historic chrono- 
logy ; and carefully weighing the facts of the case, we find 
it on the whole one degree less inconceivable and incre- 
dible that they should have risen to their present level of 
utter barbarism from one still lower, than that they should 
be the degraded progeny of any known or unknown 
civilisation. SEBASTIAN EVANS 

OUR BOOK SHELF 
A Sketch of the Life and Writings of Robert Knox, the 
Anatomist. By his pupil and colleague, Henry Lons- 
dale. (London; Macmillan and Co., 1870), 
Dr. KNOX was in many ways a remarkable man, and if 
his life had been written with greater clearness of state- 

ment and less redundance of language, it might have been 
made both interesting and instructive. But those who 
have read Dr. Lonsdale’s life of Professor Gcodsir will 
not be disappointed by the present volume. 
Robert Knox was born in 1791, and his misfortunes 
began by an attack of smallpox" which destroyed his left 
eye. He was educated at the High School of Edinburgh, 
and became a student of medicine in the University 
when nineteen years old. Five years later he was 
appointed assistant-surgeon in the army, and spent more 
than three years on duty in the Cape Colony, where Fe 
seems to have made his first studies in ethnology ard 
natural history. He next studied at Paris, and after his 
return to Edinburgh in 1822, became curator of the 
Museum of the College of Surgeons. In 1825 he joined 
Dr. Barclay in his extra-academical lectures on anatomy, 
and at once took the highest position in Edinburgh as a 
lecturer. He had many distinguished pupils— Goodsir, 
Reid, Edward Forbes, Owen, and Falconer were among 
them—and he appears to have been as popular with the 
students as he was disliked by most of his colleagues. In 
the winter of 1828-9 the terrible discovery was made of 
the system of murder carried on by Burke and Hare; 
and one of their victims was traced to Knox’s dissecting 
room. ‘This exposed him to much opprobrium, and even 
to personal danger from the Edinburgh mob; but his 
reputation was fully cleared from any suspicion of 
complicity in these crimes by the report of a committee 
of inquiry on the subject, which Dr. Lonsdale prints at 
length, together with a moderate and manly letter written 
by Knox himself to the Caledonian Mercury. That this 
affair was not the real cause of his leaving Edinburgh is 
admitted by his biographer, and-amid the chronological 
confusion of the whole book the reader is left to guess 
the causes which reduced a class of five hundred in 1832 
to nothing in 1842. Knox had been a candidate for the 
University Chair of Pathology in 1837, and for that of 
Physiology four years later. He failed each time, and the 
letters in which he submitted his claims give abundant 
reason for the enmities with which he surrounded him- 
self. The latter of these productions, full of personal 
abuse of eminent men, some of whom are still living, was 
discreditable to Knox at the time, and its publication in 
this volume is still more so, We are told that “ regard- 
less of both legal and moral obligations, he commenced 
lecturing on anatomy in Edinburgh in 1842, but got no 
class.” He tried lecturing at Glasgow, failed again, and 
after various wanderings settled in London. Here he 
maintained himself as a popular lecturer and a literary 
hack. Among his other occupations during the last 
melancholy twenty years of his life, he was pathologist to 
the Cancer Hospital, he contributed to the Proceedings 
of the Anthropological Society, and he practised mid- 
wifery. Hard working to the last, he died in London at 
the age of seventy-one. 
The moral of this life seems to be a very trite one; 
Knox was his own enemy. In spite of a biographer’s 
adulation, we are told that “on matters of business in- 
volving a donxd fide principle, Knox was prone to be 
evasive, whilst on matters of fact he was not always 
considered trustworthy.”* Yet he must have had re- 
deeming qualities, and made warm friends as well as bitter 
enemies. As an anatomist, he belonged to the older 
British school, and possessed many of its merits. He did 
geod work on the Ce¢acea and Sirenia, and appears to 
have been the first to maintain the true nature of the 
ciliary muscle, as well as to describe the fovea centralis 
in the retina of reptiles, and the tracheal pouch of the 
emeu. He was also a leader in the study of ethnology as 
* This statement is introduced by the remark that ‘‘a portrait of the 
anatomist, without its shadows and sinuous lines, would be no portrait at ail.” 
No doubt there were many such portraits of Knox on the blank walls of 
Edinburgh, when he was abused as the accomplice of Burke and Hare; but 
Dr. Lonsdale has done wisely in giving his readers the characteristic sketch 
of the anatomist lecturing, which was taken by his brilliant pupil, Edward 
Forbes, This sketch is the best thing in the book, 
