May 7, 1909] 



SCIENCE 



743 



maloca, a characteristic house of the Indians 

 of northwestern Brazil, recently described by 

 Dr. Koch-Griinberg.' The maloca's inhabi- 

 tants are mostly one family, often an old 

 couple with their grown-up sons and their 

 families, etc. They number from 10 to 100 

 individuals, all under the same roof, and the 

 author testifies to the good-behavior and 

 morality of them all. Owing to the practise 

 of extra-tribal marriage it frequently hap- 

 pens that women speaking absolutely distinct 

 languages live in the same maloca. In it also 

 are celebrated some of the great dance-festi- 

 vals. The sick are cared for within its walls 

 and the dead interred beneath the floor. The 

 maloca, is thus as far removed from the 

 "men's house," as can well be imagined, and 

 it exists among very primitive folk. This 

 serves to illustrate the relativity of some of 

 the ideas and institutions involved in the dis- 

 cussion of "primitive politics and religion." 

 The esoteric element, though often notable 

 and significant, has probably been overesti- 

 mated in the history of human evolution. 



In the opinion of the reviewer, the author 

 will add to the value of his interesting book 

 if, in a second edition, he makes an index 

 and presents the bibliography in alphabetical 

 order at the close and not as now in rather 

 distracting though instructive footnotes. 



Alexander F. Chamberlain 



Claek Univebsitt, 

 WoECESTEE, Mass. 



Unsere Ahnenreihe. {Progonotaxis hominis.) 

 Eritische Studien uber phyletische Anthro- 

 pologie. By Ernst Haeckel. Jena, Gus- 

 tav Fischer. 1908. 



This quarto memoir of fifty-seven pages is, 

 as its title-page indicates, a Festschrift in 

 honor of the 350th anniversary of the Thurin- 

 gian University at Jena, the celebration of 

 which was made the occasion for the trans- 

 ference to the university of the "Phyletic 

 Museum" founded by Professor Haeckel, 

 " das erste Museum fiir Entwicklungslehre." 

 The occasion was naturally propitious for a 

 ^ " Das Haus bei den Indianern Nordwestbra- 

 siliens," Archiv fiir Anthropologie, 1908, N. F., 

 VII., 37-50. 



consideration of that most interesting of all 

 phyletic problems, the descent of man, and in 

 the memoir before us Professor Haeckel has 

 traced the various steps, as he conceives them, 

 through which the line of ascent has passed 

 from the moners to man. What is presented 

 is, however, almost entirely a repetition of the 

 material to be found in chapters XIX.- 

 XXIII. of the "Evolution of Man," a work 

 that has already been noticed in these col- 

 umns,' and it is not until toward the close of 

 the memoir that any new contribution to the 

 question is to be found. Here, after some 

 notice of Pithecanthropus as the " missing 

 link" and a paragraph devoted to Homo pri- 

 migenius, under which term are included the 

 Neander, Spy and Krapina men, one finds a 

 description of the most striking peculiarities 

 of a skull of an Australian aborigine from 

 Queensland, which Professor Haeckel regards 

 as "the most remarkable human skull of the 

 many thousand with which anthropology has 

 concerned itself." He considers it as repre- 

 senting a reversion to the ancestral Homo 

 primigenius, and for this reason creates for 

 its original possessor the species Homo 

 palinander (;^Homo primigenius recens! 



Five plates, giving views of the norma 

 frontalis, occipitalis, verticalis, basalis and 

 lateralis of this skull, together with those of 

 Homo sapiens {germanus), Anthropithecus 

 niger, Hylohates mulleri and Gynocephalus 

 mormon, complete the memoir and are beauti- 

 ful examples of photographic reproduction. 

 A sixth plate, the series of mammalian em- 

 bryos familiar to all readers of Haeckel's 

 works, hardly requires comment. 



It may be remarked, however, that the au- 

 thor's predilection for the coinage of new 

 terms in order to give definiteness to his con- 

 cepts, finds expression in the memoir, but 

 hardly with as happy results as usual. For 

 the terms Homo neander, H. spyander and H. 

 krapinander, consistent as they are ortho- 

 graphieally, are certainly most inconsistent 

 etymologieally. 



J. P. McM. 



' Science, N. S., Vol. XXII., 1905. 



