Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/433

 376 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [n. s. f i, 1899

Wild Animals I Have Known and 200 Drawings. Being the Personal Histories ofLobo, Silver spot, Raggylug, Bingo, The Springfield Fox, The Pacing Mustang, Wully, and Redruff. By Ernest Seton Thompson. New York : Charles Scribner's Sons, 1898. 8°,

35 8 PP., 30 pi.

At first sight this highly artistic book might seem even less germane to anthropology than the recent treatise by Professor Groos ; yet on careful perusal it is found to deal, on nearly every page, with charac- teristics shared by lower animals and men — especially men of the lower culture- grades. Mr Thompson is a naturalist, as his record shows, an artist of notable strength and facility, as his effective picturing proves, and a writer of ability and skill (not to say genius), as his vivid and lucid sentences and the delicately woven web of each of his chapters testify eloquently ; more than this, he has the instinct of the voyageur, the trapper, the shepherd, and the mahout for divining the hardly scrutable workings of the animal mind and sympathizing with their simple but strong emotions and passions ; and perhaps above all else, he has the faculty of coordinating his singularly acute observations on animal activities in such fashion as to define the esthetic and industrial and social features of animality, much as the features might be de- fined by the animals themselves were they but able occasionally to reach the higher view-point and scan therefrom the lower plane of their actual existence. The book indeed is a revelation ; it opens new vistas into cloudy commonplaces, investing long-neglected facts of everyday observation with new interest, and vitalizing the dull body of system- atic (but purblind) notes on our bestial neighbors. The book is more than attractive reading merely ; it compels recognition of the great fact that lower animals possess definite social attributes — that collective units exist among the beasts no less than among men. The animals studied by Mr Thompson had their collective arts — not only their youthful sports and gambols, but their more deeply studied comedies, often trembling on the grim verge of that tragedy on which the curtain always falls at last, for such is the law of the animal realm ; they also had their industries, normally collective among the individ- uals of a group, only abnormally solitary ; they had their social organi- zation, in which craft and cunning, often combined with physical strength and grace, marked the leadership ; they had their language, not only of voice and gesture but of lepine tree-mark and canine scent- record which their own kind and even some aliens might interpret ; they had their system of education and occult discrimination and mag- nification of evil — in short, Thompson's birds and quadrupeds, biotic

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