1884.] Editors’ Table. 269 
“The punishment of the insane should be like that of the sane 
criminal, designed to protect society in two ways; firstly, by 
restraining the criminal himself from inflicting further injury; an 
secondly, by furnishing persons in the community of similar 
mental constitution with reasons for believing that it is contrary 
to their interests to commit like acts. In this way the law would 
furnish such insane with motives which would produce a change 
in the balance of the mind, the result being sanity. The punish- 
ment of death is as proper in such cases as in that of sane 
criminals of corresponding grade. The death. penalty might 
even be necessary in the case of that lower grade of the in- 
sane who do not understand consequences. In this case the 
only object sought is the protection of the community, for 
motives are less operative with these than with the higher class 
of the insane. In either, the question of moral responsibility is 
omitted from consideration, as being beyond the range of human 
knowledge.”—C. 
— When philology and archeology together take up the 
same tools and work at the Aryan problem, employing the criti- 
cal methods of paleontology, the results are most promising. 
Several works recently published converge upon the question as 
to the origin, or rather the birthplace of our Aryan ancestors. 
The origin of our domestic animals, particularly the‘horse, ox, sheep 
and pig, formerly supposed mostly to have been in Central Asia, is 
now shown to have been in Central and Eastern Europe as well 
as Western and Central Asia. The birthplace of the cereals ap- 
pears to have been for the most part in Western Asia and in 
Europe. Any one who will, from the facts given by DeCandolle 
in his “L’Origine des Plantes cultivées,” plot upon a map the 
areas where they have been found wild, will be surprised to see 
that most of the areas of wheat, barley, rye and oats lie in the 
Western border of Asia and in Southeastern Europe. We are 
not, then, compelled to vaguely look to the highlands of north- 
western India and of Central Asia for the origin of our domestic 
animals and plants. | 
And now a reviewer in the Academy of Dec. 8, Mr. A. H. 
Sayce, in noticing two recent German works on the origin of the 
St achvergleichung und Urgeschichte) has for the first time em- 
Ployed a thoroughly critical method in determining the character 
