Whatever may be our view of the estimate which these distinguished and earnest writers have made concerning American aims and purposes as they relate to Japan, it must be granted that they have presented an intelligible and credible interpretation of present-day Japanese life. This estimate stands in striking contrast with the Japan of the globe trotter, and leads us to understand that "peerless Fuji" and the "island-bedecked inland sea,' the jog of the jinricksha and the tang of the samisen, are things but incidental to Japan; that instead of the real Japan being as the enthusiast would have us believe, a land of superhuman achievements, it is, instead, a nation still trying to find a solution for the insistent and inescapable problems of national life; that the Japanese people, instead of being a nation devoted to international treachery and inter-racial diabolism, is, on the contrary, a people animated by feelings of genuine neighborliness and friendship, desirous only of good-will and mutual understanding.

Japan stands revealed to us not as an inscrutable Oriental personality, elusive, mysterious and incomprehensible, but as a virile, strong, progressive nation, caught in the grip of kindred social, economic and ethical problems like ourselves and seeking from every source light which will help her solve them. She shares with other nations in a great evolution which keeps her busy trying to work out the problems involved in the increasingly accentuated division between labor and capital; in the normal distribution of her population so as to avoid the evils of overcrowding; in the securing of an adequate food supply for a nation nearly ninety per cent of whose territory is not arable; in the adjustment of the low state of income to the high cost of living; and in the development of an educational system that shall result in righteous character as well as accurate scholarship.

These writers realize that the discordant voices which have sought to speak about Japan in the past have obscured the real Japan. They have therefore spoken and we cannot but be grateful for their message and apply to them the words which Yukio Ozaki has applied to the men who stand for the Peace Movement throughout the world:

If the voice of the mischiefmakers is louder than ours it is only because we are silent. We men of peace are generally too quiet and too modest. We ought to shout and fight as much as our noisy opponents, for our cause is noble and sacred. Let us speak out our hearts; let the joyous voice of peace drown the wicked cry for war; and let it echo and re-echo in melodious harmony from both sides of the Pacific Ocean.

Negro Culture in West Africa. By GEORGE W. ELLIS, K.C., F.R.G.S. 1914. 1 vol. Pp. 290. Price $2.15. G. W. Ellis, 3000 South State Street, Chicago, Ill.

In his Negro Culture in West Africa, Mr. Ellis gives the results of his studies in the social life of the Vai, a race of true negroes found chiefly in Liberia and a shrewd and capable people whose culture we are apt to underestimate. They are in the main Muhammedans who have been touched by Islamic culture to the extent that certain of them possess libraries of Arabic books covering a considerable range of subjects. The author describes their physical aspect and treats of their life in its economic, social, political, and religious phases. More than one-third of the book is devoted to Vai proverbs and folklore stories, which contain so largely the native philosophy of life. Perhaps the most striking feature in the culture of the Vai is that they alone among African negro tribes have invented a script which has been put into practical use. Specimen plates show the character of this script which is different from any of the written languages of the world.

The author, from his eight years' service as Secretary of the United States Legation in Liberia, and the investigations made by him during that period, is especially well-qualified to give an intimate and sympathetic picture of the life of a racial group which is destined to have much to do with forming the future of Liberia. Frederick Starr, professor of anthropology in the University of Chicago, contributes an interesting introduction, in which he points out the necessity, to students of race development, of understanding the history and present status of such African tribes as the Vai.

The volume is an important and interesting contribution to the knowledge of negro culture in Africa.

Die Rehobother Bastards und das Bastardierungsproblem beim Menschen. By EUGEN FISCHER. Jena: Gustav Fischer. 1913. Pp. vii, 327.

Attempts to establish the Mendelian law have been made by experiments in the cross-breeding of plants and animals, but it has been much more difficult to work out the laws of heredity among men where experimentation is impossible. Dr. Fischer's contention is that the best results will be obtained not by a study of pure races but rather of those races where cross-breeding has taken place. For example, a study of the crossing of the white

and negro, the white and Indian, and the negro and Indian in the Americas, would throw a great deal of light on heredity, were it not for the fact that they form a class of society to be distinguished only with the greatest difficulty from the other classes. For that reason Dr. Fischer has made his studies among the Bastards of Rehoboth in German Southwest Africa. They are the result of the crossing of Boer and Hottentot, races so distinct that it is easy to trace the inheritance of their physical characteristics in which Dr. Fischer was principally interested. They constitute a distinct group whose history is known with a fair degree of accuracy. The book begins with a description of the country and a history of the Bastards as a race and also of the twentythree families of whom the author made a special study; a description of their physical characteristics and a discussion of the Mendelian law as it bears on the inheritance of these characteristics; and finally a brief study of their life, political, economic, and psychic, showing the influence of the two original races upon the cross-breed. Dr. Fischer has worked out with a great deal of care, twenty-three family histories and has made measurements of a great many of their individual members. His conclusions are that the Mendelian law holds good for race-crossing, the inheritance of the racial traits of the two lines following alternately, but that the inheritance is of individual rather than racial characteristics and that a new pure race does not result from crossbreeding.

En Algérie. By ARNOLD VAN GENNEP. Paris: Mercure de France. 1914. Pp. 217.

His

This little account of M. van Gennep's five months' stay in Algiers in search of ethnological material is one to be read with a good deal of pleasure if not with so very much profit. purpose was to study the native arts and industries in their proper environment and he has gathered together here the by-products of his search for knowledge in the form of the amusing experiences which befell him and which lose nothing in the telling.

The one serious contribution among these sketches is a study of the native mentality, in which he notes that the natives are able to comprehend our whole civilization, intellectual and material, excepting only our natural sciences to which we owe our intellectual freedom. There takes place here as in the inhabitants of many other tropical lands an arrest of mental develop

ment between the ages of twenty-five and thirty. As an explanation of this phenomenon the author advances, (1) the literary rigidity imposed by Islam; (2) the appeal to the authority of others also imposed by Islam; (3) the precocious development of sexuality sanctioned if not ordained by Islam; (4) the compensatory retrogression due to woman, a reason which he assigns tentatively because the laws of heredity have not been fully established; and (5) the lesser complexity of the social life, for the more complex the social life is, the more each individual is obliged to acquire a more complex and extended knowledge and if he does not possess this faculty of adaptation to a changing environment, he is condemned to die.

The Life of a South African Tribe. By HENRI A. JUNOD. Vol. I: The Social Life. 1912. Pp. 500. Vol. II: The Psychic Life. 1913. London: Macmillan. Pp. 574.

Mr. Junod, of the Swiss Romande Mission, has made a very careful study of the Thonga tribe, a group of Bantu peoples settled on the eastern coast of South Africa, in Natal, the Transvaal, Rhodesia, and mostly in Portugese East Africa. The first volume published in 1912 dealt with the social life, taking first the life of the individual and then various phases of family, communal, and national life. The second volume, published in 1913, is entitled The Psychic Life. A transitional section at the beginning of the second volume treats of agriculture and industry with a very interesting chapter on the native system of land tenure. This is followed by a study of the Thonga literature and art prefaced by a discussion of the characteristics of the Bantu intellect as exhibited in their language which has reached a high stage of development. The last section is devoted to religion and superstition.

The two volumes form a very valuable study of the life of an African tribe in all its phases. Perhaps the strongest impression that comes from the reading is that the Bantus, far from being the primitive people we are accustomed to consider them, have really developed by many stages and through long periods of time, a very complex civilization. Mr. Junod has worked out in tentative fashion four periods of this development, the second one ending in 1500, showing a decided progress due largely to changes in environmental conditions.

Marriage Ceremonies in Morocco. By EDWARD WESTERMARCK. London: Macmillan. 1914. Pp. xii, 422.

Dr. Westermarck's latest book is designed to fill a gap in his History of Human Marriage in which he treated in very brief fashion the wedding ceremonies and, as he says, "failed to recognize their magical significance." In the present volume, he describes, with a wealth of detail, the wedding customs of a single people, the Muhammedan natives of Morocco, selecting as representative one tribe each from the several groups. Starting from a description of the customs as observed by himself and related to him by natives, he seeks to interpret them, so far as he can, with the aid of the native explanations. While he does not adopt Mr. Ernest Crawley's theory that "ceremonies of marriage are intended to neutralise the dangers supposed to be connected with all contact between man and woman and with the state of marriage itself, as also to make the union safe, prosperous, and happy," he does find these as the root-ideas in practically all the marriage-rites; that is, a prophylactic or purificatory purpose to ward off the dangers which seem to be bound up with marriage and sexual intercourse; and a desire to bring positive benefits to the union such as wealth, fecundity, and domestic peace.

It goes without saying that any contribution by Dr. Westermarck to the field of sociology and anthropology will be most valuable, and this is a careful study based upon six years of residence and investigation among the native tribes of Morocco.

In the notes at the end of the book, Dr. Westermarck reprints his article, published in Folklore, 1911, replying to Dr. Frazer's criticism of his theory of the origin of the prohibition of marriage between kindred and exogamy which amplifies the position he had already taken in his previous writings.

Einfluss von Erblichkeit und Umwelt auf das Wachstum. By FRANZ BOAS. Zeitschrift für Ethnologie. 1913. Vol. 45. Pp. 615-627.

Professor Boas in this article on the influence of heredity and environment on growth, tries to determine the inherited differences in characteristic periods of development, the influence of environment upon the rate of development, and the possibility of separating the two factors. He starts with the assumption that the longer any part of the body takes to develop the greater will probably be the influence of environment upon its develop