Man, Past and Present. By A. H. Keane. (Cambridge Univer-
sity Press. 12s.)—This volume is, we learn from the preface, a continuation of the first volume of the " Cambridge Geographical Series,"—" Ethnology." In two preliminary chapters we have a summary account of man as he was in what Professor Keane holds to have been the beginning of his existence, the Pleistocene period, and to the subsequent stages of the Stone and Metal Ages. The subject of the earlier volume is thus resumed, and we pass on to the Historic period. This done, we have a systematic account of the peoples of the world; in chaps. S and 4 the Continental, and in 5 the Oceanic negroes, 6-9 deal with the Mongols, 10 and 11 with the American aborigines (where Professor Keane may be profitably compared with Mr. Payne's elaborate treatise on the same subject), and finally we have in 12-14 "The Caucasic Peoples." Professor Keane, we see, pronounces against the use of the word " Aryan " as an ethnological expression. He would restrict it to philology, where alone it has, he thinks, a real sig- nifieance. It is certainly remarkable, as he himself observes, that the Caucasic division is " the most debateable field in the whole range of anthropological studies," though one might sup- pose that it is the one of which we should know most. It is a further upset if we are to abandon the word "Aryan." We have recently had the popular notions about the cradle of the race overthrown, and now we are told that there is no such race, or rather that there was "an absorption of the original stock in a hundred other races in remote prehistoric times."
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