104 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. V., No. 105. 



servaton' which our Good Samaritan has seen 

 fit to establish ; and only then shall the dis- 

 coverer make his observation generally known, 

 when he shall have received acknowledgment 

 from the director mentioned. Now, it is im- 

 portant for the proper observation of any new 

 wanderer that the news of it should be sent 

 about the world without delay. The earliest 

 observations of a comet are of especial value in 

 fixing its orbit, and may, with bad weather or 

 other mishap, be the only ones. A well-organ- 

 ized sj-stem for the collecting and transmitting 

 of such information exists, and it is surely to 

 be regretted that any condition should be at- 

 tached to a reward which shall interfere with 

 the benefits to be derived from the success of 

 the worth}' investigator. Such a condition is 

 that which requires the competitor for a War- 

 ner prize to send word to Rochester before he 

 can give the information to the International 

 association of observatories. 



Every worker in a special field of scientific 

 or technical stud}^ must from time to time feel 

 depressed under the difficulty, indeed too often 

 the impossibility, of keeping himself well in- 

 formed on what the world is accomplishing 

 even in his own narrow department ; so rapid 

 is the succession, and so wide the separation, 

 of papers and books treating of his subject. 

 At such times he can appreciate the value of 

 well-prepared current bibliographic records. 

 The geographer turns to the monthly lists in 

 Petermann's mittheilungen. or to the annual 

 one published by the Berlin geographical so- 

 ciety ; the geologist has the Neues jahrbuch, 

 and would gladly refer to the Geological record 

 if it would only continue to appear in as good 

 form as it began a few years ago ; the 

 zoologist has his Anzeiger, Record, and Jah- 

 resbericht ; and the chemist and the physicist 

 are equally well cared for. But these extended 

 lists are matters of provocation to many per- 

 sons who cannot reach the books they name : 

 for them a record is better suited that limits 

 its selections by place instead of by subject, 

 and gives a list of all kinds of publications on 

 a certain geographic field. Two of these are 



mentioned in our notes, and both suggest the 

 value of a similar work for our own country. 

 The scope of such a volume would be sufficient 

 for the purposes of many of our readers, if it 

 included a record of the title, and a brief men- 

 tion of the contents, of every thing written con- 

 cerning our physical and natural history }*ear 

 b} T year. If undertaken by a number of spe- 

 cialists, the work would not be too laborious, 

 and it would surely find publisher and pur- 

 chasers. Why should not the Smithsonian 

 institution undertake it? 



LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 



*** Correspondents are requested to be as brief as possible. The 

 writer's name is in all cases required as proof of good faith. 



Anthropos and anthropopithecus. 



I am glad that Professor Haynes, availing himself 

 of my references, has refreshed his memory on de 

 Mortillet. He will not again confound the age of St. 

 Acheul with the axe of St. Acheul; and he and 

 other readers of Science will now be aware that de 

 Mortillet teaches that not man (the anthropos), but 

 the man-ape (the anthropopithecus), was the repre- 

 sentative of our species during most of the paleo- 

 lithic period. 



But why does che learned reviewer confine him- 

 self to the passages I pointed out to him? Why did 

 he not turn to de Mortillet' s work (p. 104), where he 

 says, " L'homme quaternaire ancien n'etait pas le 

 meme que l'homme actuel " ? And where in the geo- 

 logic horizon does de Mortillet place the arrival of 

 Vhomme actuel? Let any reader turn to the table 

 of contents of the volume, and he will find that it is 

 divided into three parts: 1. L'homme tertiaire; 2. 

 L'homme quaternaire; 3. L'homme actuel. The last 

 mentioned arrived, says the author, after a long and 

 unexplained hiatus, with the period of Bobenhausen (p. 

 485). Only in that period does de Mortillet concede 

 to man his distinctive psychological traits of a lan- 

 guage and a religion. Speaking of the very last of 

 the Magdalenian period, he says, "L'homme quater- 

 naire etait completement depourvu du sentiment de 

 la reMigiosite." D. G. Brinton, M.D. 



Dr. Brinton seems to be unfortunate in under- 

 standing de Mortillet' s opinions, as well as in quot- 

 ing his language correctly. Owing to the exigencies 

 of space, ' the readers of Science' must be referred to 

 the book itself, where they will find it stated that 

 there is no conclusive proof that funeral practices 

 prevailed in western Europe in quaternary times, 

 and that such usages came into vogue there in the 

 neolithic period. Ilinc Mae lacrymae ! This is the 

 sole foundation for Dr. Brinton's monstrous assertion 

 "that de Mortillet teaches that not man, but the 

 man-ape, was the representative of our species during 

 most of the paleolithic period." De Mortillet's real 

 views will be found summed up on the last page of 

 his work, in twelve 'general conclusions,' so clearly 

 and tersely ' that he who runs may read.' 



Henry W. Haynes. 



1A translation of this summary will appear in our 

 next issue. — EuJ 



