352 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. IV. No. 89. 



offered. All the steps of the ceremony of 

 incineration are examined in the original 

 texts, followed by those referring to the 

 gathering of the bones, the erection of the 

 funerary monument, the offerings to fire, 

 the strewing of the seed, and the numerous 

 steps of the complicated ritual. These the 

 author handles with a thorough mastery of 

 the subject and the language. When it is 

 remembered that to an ancient Aryan (and 

 to many non- Aryans) no object in his life 

 was so important as that he should have 

 proper funeral rites, the interest attached 

 to such ceremonies will be appreciated. 



M. Felix Eegnault, in the Bulletins de la 

 Society d' Anthropologic of Paris (Fasc. 1, 

 1896), in an article on funeral rites, argues 

 that incineration and various other methods 

 of destroying the flesh were intended for the 

 benefit of the living, not to follow out the 

 wishes of the dead. The survivors wanted 

 the bones for charms and fetishes. 



THE PSYCHOLOGY OF PRIMITIVE MAN. 



What is the mental state of savages, and, 

 going beyond them, what were the mental 

 powers of early man, are queries of prime 

 interest in ethnology. Some have placed 

 the hunting tribes on a par with immature 

 individuals in civilized lands ; while others 

 hold ^ the gray barbarian lower than the 

 Christian child.' This is the opinion of 

 Dr. Friedmann, who, in a paper analyzed 

 in the Centralblatt fur Anthropologies Heft 

 3, undertakes to prove that the state of 

 primitive thought is nothing more nor less 

 than insanity, and has its parallel only 

 in our asylums for mental diseases. He 

 claims that to the savage, as to the insane, 

 there is no distinction between the idea and 

 its reality, that the law of causality is re- 

 stricted to the narrowest sensuous limits, 

 and that the logical processes of thought are 

 constantly violated. All this is true, but 

 do we dare or care to say how true it is also 

 of the people at large around us ? 



The same subject has been treated at 

 length by Prof. Pinsero, of Palermo, whose 

 views are epitomized in L^Anthropologie. 

 He thinks that early man was mentally 

 lower than the anthropoid apes, for these 

 had a religion, to wit, serpent worship (!) 

 and man had none. 



No doubt the estimate of the savage mind 

 has been placed too high by various writers ; 

 but this looks as if the current is just now 

 as much too strong in the other direction. 



D. G. Brinton. 



University of Pennsylvania. 



SCIENTIFIC NOTES AND NEWS. 



SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH AND COMMERCIAL 



SUCCESS. 



A LETTER from Prof. W. Ostwald on scien- 

 tific education in Germany and England has 

 been communicated by Prof. W. Ramsay to the 

 London Times and is made the occasion of 

 'leaders' in that journal and in Nature. Ger- 

 many has, as is well known, supplanted Great 

 Britain in the control of the fine chemical mar- 

 kets of the world, and this is due more to 

 scientific research than to commercial enter- 

 prise. Prof. Ostwald informs us that there are 

 many chemical works in Germany, each of 

 which employ more than one hundred students 

 of chemistry who have taken their Doctor's 

 degrees at the University, and are engaged not 

 in the management of the manufacture, but in 

 making inventions. These chemists have been 

 trained for years under men such as Prof. Ost- 

 wald; they have published theses containing 

 the results of original research, and finally are 

 able to devote their lives to invention and in- 

 vestigation. Those who cannot appreciate the 

 scientific importance of research will be con- 

 vinced by the logic of commercial success. 



If a very small part of the money spent by the 

 government of the United States in the protec- 

 tection of manufactures by import duties had 

 been used in higher technical education, and es- 

 pecially in the encouragement of scientific re- 

 search, we feel sure that the industries and 

 commerce of the country would be in a very 

 different condition from that in which they are 



