REVIEWS OF RECENT LITERATURE. 
ANTHROPOLOGY. 
Payne’s New World. — The second volume of this work, com- 
posed by an Oxfordian scholar, was published last year, and for its 
great intrinsic value deserves an extended notice ; indeed there are 
but few historic works treating about this western continent that are 
written in a more careful and painstaking spirit. The full title is: 
Edward John Payne, History of the. New World, called America, Vol. 
II. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1899 ; octavo, pp. 27, 548. The 
volume begins with a sociological discussion on the pre-Columbian 
condition of the American tribes, their warrior and peasant classes, 
and the origin of the industrial class. Woman was the primitive 
laborer; she became enslaved by capture or by purchase, and the 
marriage question in the earliest epochs was nothing but a part of 
the problem of the food quest. The organization of the laboring 
class and the distribution of slaves and of land form another socio- 
logical chapter well worth studying. Then follows the discussion on the 
origin of the tribe, the horde, the family, the clan, the great house, 
together with the tribal migrations and the motives impelling peoples 
to migrate. The headings of subsequent sections of the work are as 
follows: Antiquity of Man in America; Ethnological Unity of the 
Aborigines; Origin and Process of Language; Material Aspect of 
Speech; Adaptation of Elementary Movements to Articulation; 
Mechanics of Language — Repetition; Original Aspects of Person- 
ality; Dynamics of the Holophrase ; Differentiation of the Noun and 
Verb; Dispersonalization; Distinction of Number in Objects; Prim- 
itive Applications of Arithmetic; Calendars or Time-reckoning ; 
Mexican Calendar; Spread of Man over the New World ; History 
of the Nahuatlacá (Mexicans); First Nahuatlacan Immigrants ; 
Aculhuan Pueblos of the Plateau; The Valley of Mexico; The 
Aztecs; Peruvian Advancement. 
To give our readers an idea how interestingly the material is 
handled by Payne, we transcribe what he says about agricultural 
communities, exclusively composed of women (pp. 10, 11), as have 
been discovered in many parts of the inhabited earth. ‘Such com- 
munities were formed, it would seem, by the same process of spon- 
231 
