Perhaps it is a good thing that while half our
professors are busy researching, the other half should merely put together the results of their colleagues' labours, culled from dry articles in obscure scientific journals, and give them to the world in a readable, entertaining form. • So let us be grateful for Professor Hooton's book (Allen and Unwin, los. 6d.), in which he presents with wit and common sense the latest discoveries in the field of physical anthropology. Much has been done of late in tracing " the missing link," and how nearly we find him in Pithecanthropus, and the significance of Sinan- thropus' teeth is here related to human evolution generally. Professor Hooton rather repeats himself, as is almost inevitable in a book of collected addresses delivered at different times to different bodies ; but he casts a quick and intelligent eye on all the problems of anthropology that affect man as • a biological specimen. Racial myths he sums up and forcibly explodes ; co-operation between physical and social anthro- pology he reasonably demands ; and he devotes his last papers to the problem of man the biological animal, degenerating through the over-breeding of the unfit and abnormal. He ends : " We must stop trying to cure malignant biological groWths with patent sociological nostrums. The emergency demands a surgical operation." But what operation, and by whom applied, he, of course, cannot tell us. The book is provided with a good glossary and a somewhat gap-toothed index.
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