July 3, 1891.] 



SCIENCE. 



preached it. From the fifth to the tenth year inclusive the growth 

 is somewhat slow, about 6.5 millimetres in all, but for the next 

 four years, the period of adolescence, the growth is 6.2 millimetres. 

 From the fourteenth year on there is very little advance, the maxi- 



mum seeming to be reached at about 138 millimetres in the twen- 

 tieth year. 



On comparing this growth with that of the male face some dif- 

 ferences are noticeable. The male face is, with perhaps a single 

 exception, larger for the same period of life and for the same years : 



BOOK-REVIEWS. 



The Evolution of Marriage and of the Family. By Ch. Letoue- 

 NEAU. New York, Scribner. 373 p. $1.35. 



Among the distinguished French students of sociology, Professor 

 Letourneau has long stood in the first rank. He approaches the 

 great study of man free from bias and shy of generalizations. 

 To collect, scrutinize, and appraise facts is his chief business. In 

 the volume before us he shows these qualities in an admirable 

 degree. The subject is one of the most vital in social dynamics, 

 for the relation of the sexes is the foundation of primitive society, 

 and on primitive rests and grows all higher social development. 



He dismisses as unfounded the extravagant views of McLennan, 

 Lubbock, and our own countryman, Morgan, who would identify 

 primitive marriage with sexual promiscuity. Here, as elsewhere, 

 his opinions are based not merely on the facts of ethnography, 

 but on numerous analogies drawn from the higher orders of the 

 animals inferior to man: for Letourneau holds, along with all 

 other leading ethnographers, that in the senses and emotions man 

 reveals no other distinction above the beast than one of degree, 

 nowhere one of kind ; and to understand the motives and customs 

 of the savage state, more is learned from the brute than from the 

 civilized man. 



it appears to grow more rapidly and continues to grow later in life. 

 Massing the cases after twenty, the advance is seen to be far beyond 

 the breadth attained at nineteen, rising to about 138 millimetres. 

 , At about nine years the two types approach very near, and it is 

 not at all unlikely that, as found in the case of height by Bow- 

 ditch in Boston and Peckham in Milwaukee, the female face 

 may for a short period become the broader. Further investiga- 

 tions will be required to determine this point, the present investi- 

 gation having been made on not more than twenty-five hundred 

 persons, including both sexes. Gerald M. West. 



Clark University, Worcester, Mass., June 18. 



His range of comparison covers all races and extends over all 

 conditions of society. At the close of his attractive pages he ven- 

 tures to forecast the future of the institution of marriage. He 

 believes that it will be a merely civil contract, monogamous in 

 character, easily contracted, and freely dissolved by simple mutual 

 consent of the contracting parties. Something very near this is 

 already the case in the more enlightened of the Swiss cantons and 

 of the United States. The utmost facility of divorce, with proper 

 guarantees for the interest of the parties concerned,— children and 

 parents,— is the condition to which this work, as well as other 

 unprejudiced studies of the marital relation, unfailingly point. 



