1881.] Recent Literature. 99! 
study of the lower invertebrate as well as vertebrate organisms, 
so our modern civilization can only be analyzed and clearly un- 
derstood by reference to the social structures of savage life and 
the developmental steps by which the savage became a barbarian, 
and the barbarian threw aside the features of savagery, and after a 
series of changes, paralleled by the metamorphoses of the butter- 
fly or starfish, assumed the advanced forms and environment of 
civilized life. Nay, a tolerably exact parallelism may be made be- 
tween the premature civilization of certain races of mankind and 
those which more slowly and surely developed into modern and 
probably permanent types of civilization. The prematuritive type 
of pseudo-civilization of Peru and Mexico, of Babylon and Assyria, 
So strikingly suggestive of later and specialized types of civilized 
life, may be compared to the prematuritive, generalized, prophetic 
types of Silurian ganoids and Selachian fishes, which flourished as 
€xceptionally perfect forms amid the multitudes of lower organ- 
isms about them, and which sank, as it were, and died under the 
weight of the ill-assorted and unequally perfected assemblage of 
Organs composing their bodies. Anomalous and unintelligible 
would be the premature and comparatively short-lived pseudo- 
Civilizations of the infancy of our race, were it not written in the 
rocks that the idea has been worked out again and again in pale- 
0zoic history. 
Such reflections and considerations as these are provoked by 
any course of biological study, and by reading Herbert Spencer's 
writings on sociology and more particularly the modest and able 
work before us of Mr. Tylor. In the present book the science of 
anthropology has been, perhaps for the first time, reduced to co- 
herent and intelligible shape. Ina simple and yet masterly way 
the subject is outlined and put into the briefest form. The aim of 
the author has evidently been to simply sketch out a subject vast 
and intricate in its details. 
We will now give a synopsis of the subject, to enable our readers 
to form a slight idea of what anthropology is, and it should be 
premised that the science has been largely built up and promoted 
by geologists and biologists, who established the fact of the high 
antiquity of man, which led them to investigate the habits and 
arts of the prehistoric races, and thus to utilize the results of eth- 
nologists and archeologists, until the missing links between the 
prehistoric and historic races of mankind could be with tolerable 
certainty supplied. 
ginning with the fact that man may be divided into races 
rather than species, our author remarks that: “ Altogether, the 
evidence of ancient monuments, geography and history goes to 
prove that the great race-divisions of mankind are of no recent 
growth, but were already settled before the beginning of the his- 
torical period. Since then their changes seem to have been com- 
paratively slight, except in the forming of mixed races by inter- 
