JANUARY 12, 1912] 
and information that will greatly aid him in 
his efforts to account for the events of to-day. 
It is well known that Dr. Ross spent many 
months in 1910 traveling through China. He 
went for the express purpose of studying the 
sociology of China, and although the numer- 
ous authors of recent books on the celestial 
empire have usually had a much longer ex- 
perience in that country than Dr. Ross, still 
they have not for the most part gone there for 
a specific purpose, and their accounts are 
more or less incidental to other objects that 
called them there. None of them, so far as 
I am aware, are professional sociologists, and 
their observations are chiefly centered on polit- 
ical affairs. Of course they treat social mat- 
ters too, but only from the ordinary stand- 
point, and not in a systematic and scientific 
way. Dr. Ross’s equipment for observing 
social phenomena enabled him to see more in 
a few months than some would see in many 
years. It also enabled him to interpret facts 
in the light of a great store of scientific 
knowledge of human society in general. 
Whatever he observed he instantly saw the 
full meaning of, and was thus able to cor- 
relate oriental with occidental conditions. 
The entire history of the western world was 
at his command, and by this means he could 
locate China in its proper part of the his- 
toric panorama. Instead of considering the 
Chinese such a strange people as most ob- 
servers do, because they are unlike ourselves, 
he simply ran his eye back along the path of 
European history till he found the epoch at 
which Europeans were what the Chinese are 
now. He found it in the middle ages, and he 
says: 
Not that there is anything queer in the working 
of the Oriental brain. Not in the least. Their 
popular thought is unripe, that is all. The bulk 
of the Chinese match up well with our forefathers 
between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. 
For in the Middle Ages white men were just as 
haphazard, casual and uncritical as are the yellow 
men to-day. They looked for ‘‘signs and wonders 
in the heavens’’ and trembled at comets. They 
held that blood-root, on account of its red juice, 
must be a blood purifier; liverwort, having a liver- 
SCIENCE 65 
shaped leaf, will cure liver disease; eyebright, 
being marked with a spot like an eye, is good for 
eye troubles; and so on. They fasted, exorcized 
demons, burned witches, trusted talismans, paraded 
sacred images, wore relics of the saints, sought 
the king’s touch to cure scrofula, marched in 
religious processions to bring change of weather 
and hung consecrated bells in steeples to ward off 
lightning. It was the rise of the natural sciences 
that cleared the fog from the European brain. 
In the building of astronomy, physics, chemistry 
and physiology were wrought out certain methods 
—observation, measurement, trial and error, ex- 
periment—which were as helpful for practical life 
as for.science. For a method that connects cause 
and effect may also light up the relation between 
effort and result (pp. 315-316). 
In some things the Chinese would seem to 
belong to a still earlier stage in the develop- 
ment of Caucasian peoples, for the absence of 
chimneys and glass windows carries us back 
to the first century of our era. They were 
unknown to antiquity, but were found in the 
ruins of Pompeii, which was buried in the 
year 79 a.p. In their apparent ignorance of 
the value of milk as food the Chinese go all 
the way back to the Homeric period. 
One of the most important points brought 
out by Dr. Ross, known of course to others, 
but little emphasized, is the astonishing con- 
firmation that China furnishes of the great 
“»rinciple of population” of Malthus. Nearly 
all the woes that China suffers are due di- 
rectly or indirectly to the operation of this 
principle, and we may say, secondarily, to its 
ignorance of it. We thus read: 
For a grinding mass poverty that can not he 
matched in the Occident there remains but one 
general cause, namely, the crowding of population 
upon the means of subsistence. Why this people 
should so behave more than other peoples, why 
this gifted race should so recklessly multiply as to 
condemn itself to a sordid struggle for a bare 
existence can be understood only when one under- 
stands the constitution of the Chinese family 
(p. 96). . . . For adults over-population not only 
spells privation and drudgery, but it means a life 
averaging about fifteen years shorter than ours. 
Small wonder, indeed, for in some places human 
beings are so thick the earth is literally foul 
from them. Unwittingly they poison the ground, 
