July 22, 1922] 



NA TURE 



107 



with Europeans comparatively recent. Whereas Mr. 

 Brown was with them for a short time, depended on 

 interpreters, did not know the language except super- 

 fii ially, and only met them after they had been so 

 decimated by epidemics that the tribes had had to 

 drop their old exclusiveness and mingle freely together. 

 It is true that Mr. Man was a pioneer who had to learn 



An Andaman Islander shooting fish in Port Blair Harbour. 

 From "The Andaman Islanders." 



his way, and that Mr. Brown was a trained observer 

 from the beginning, but all who know Mr. Man's work 

 cannot also help knowing how meticulously and 

 conscientiously careful he is in recording an observation 

 of fact. It requires some boldness to differ from him 

 on the point of accuracy. Several observers have 

 tried, and not successfully. The result is that this 

 latest book on the Andamanese after all contains only 

 evidence and not judgment. Mr. Brown is, here, 

 NO. 2751, VOL. I IO] 



nothing more than a witness — a good witness certainly, 

 trained to his work — but only a witness, and the reader 

 will have to decide for himself between him and Mr. 

 Man. 



In the matter ot recording language Mr. Brown has 

 not been fortunate, though he has laboured hard. 

 The older books and articles, from Mr. Man's works 

 onwards, used an alphabet framed ad 

 hoc by no less an authority than the 

 late if r. A. J. Ellis, whose skill, know- 

 ledge, and experience in such matters 

 are still difficult to beat. The result 

 has been that a good trustworthy 

 system for recording these " un- 

 written " dialects for English readers 

 has been in vogue for something like 

 half a century. Mr. Brown has 

 discarded it, and substituted the 

 " Anthropos " Alphabet of Pater 

 Schmidt. No one disputes the 

 capacity of Pater Schmidt in this 

 matter, but why in a book by an 

 Englishman for English readers, pub- 

 lished by an English University, go 

 to an Austrian for the transcription 

 of the language of the inhabitants of 

 a British possession, when an ade- 

 quate and well-known English trans- 

 cription has been established for a 

 long period, and has been used in 

 many books ? At any rate the result 

 is not happy. Diacritical marks are 

 used which are strange to English 

 readers, though common enough in 

 the Eastern European languages. 

 The vowels are not familiar to users 

 of English, and what are we to say of 

 an observer who cannot detect the 

 difference between " the e in error " 

 and " a in Mary,'' and thinks they 

 represent the same sound (p. 496). 

 Or between the " in not " and the 

 " in nought " (p. 496). Unhappily 

 for Mr. Brown all four sounds are 

 common in Andamanese, and he has 

 thus put himself out of court as a recorder of 

 languages, much more so as a critic of other people's 

 work in this respect. 



Like so many of his Oxford and Cambridge con- 

 temporaries, Mr. Brown reverts too often to a bad 

 habit of the seventeenth-century writers on travel and 

 foreign countries in ignoring the bibliography of his 

 subject— in this case a long one— except to appropriate 

 without acknowledgment the information gathered, 



