Page:American Anthropologist NS vol. 1.djvu/840

 MASON] ANTHROPOLOGIC LITERA TURE 769

The starting-point is Java, whence man began to spread ; erect, but physically and mentally ape-like, though having rudimentary speech. On the question when and where this Pliocene proto-human became the Pleistocene precursors, Mr Keane is a little obscure, inso- much that both Sergi and Ehrenreich call him a polygenist, but this he hotly denies. For the enactment of all human history a million years of time are demanded.

The bulk of the volume is taken up with the discussion of the four primary divisions, the Ethiopic, the Mongolic, the American, and the Caucasic. Each part is preceded by a thesis or text or conspectus, an excellent arrangement, in which the author lays down in italics just what he means to prove concerning the primeval home, the present home, the physical or anthropographic characters, the mental characters (including speech, religion, and culture), and the main ethnic subdi- visions of the group.

The Ethiopic variety is treated under the head of African Negroes and Papuasians, or Oceanic Negroes, which are held to be one, and their subdivisions correspond. Mr Keane's statement of the universal spread of the Papuasians in the Indo- Pacific must be taken with cau- tion. His appreciation of the whole Ethiopic variety is disparaging.

Mongolic man had his root on the Tibetan plateau, and developed two main limbs, the Mongolo-Tatar, who is made to include even the Eskimo, and the Tibeto-Indo-Chinese, with an eastern oceanic offshoot. The development of the Oceanic Mongols becomes especially important now, since the United States has undertaken the care of five millions of them. It is to be hoped that those charged with this discipline will take into their counsel trained ethnologists.

Homo Amcricanus, with whom the readers of this journal are especially concerned, Mr Keane holds, occupied the Western Hemisphere from Point Barrow to Fuegia in Pleistocene times. He reached America in the primitive state, by two streams of migration, the eastern, long- headed, or Eskimo-Botocudo, the earliest ; and the western, later, short-headed, new Stone-Age stream. And then the trails were closed. No doubt Mr Keane can find in recent literature statements by most excellent authorities to the effect that "stone implements and many other things are found in the latest Pleistocene deposits of valleys and plains everywhere throughout America." But this is only the writer's opinion, not a fact. For us, a fact is an exact agreement between what exists and what is said to exist, and on this plea, the latest researches of the Bureau of American Ethnology do not confirm the existence of the Pleistocene American. But the readers of this journal will also be amazed to find that two of our colleagues have been utterly ignored from

AM. ANTH M N. S., I— 49

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