Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/115

Rh so necessary when travelling into the depths of the unknown past. Early man was a product of his own time, not of ours. To understand him and his ways we must project ourselves as much as possible into his surroundings, both physical and psychological. Studies such as Mr. Seebohm has given us enable us to do this far more effectually than most others of the same kind, and we can think of no better introduction to the proper conception of early Celtic and Teutonic Britain than the mass of minute details which Mr. Seebohm has transformed into briUiant flashes of light.

first knowledge which Professor Haddon gained of the people of Torres Straits was in 1888, in the course of an expedition which had for its primary object the study of the coral-reef and marine zoology of the district. His incomplete examination of the races occupying these islands supplied the materials for an interesting contribution to the Journal of the Anthropological Institute and to Folklore, and suggested a more complete survey of this region from the anthropological side, which was carried out in 1898-9 under the auspices of the University of Cambridge. The present volume is an introductory and popular sketch of the results of this survey, the detailed records of which are in course of publication.

The main interest of this inquiry lies in the fact that it was largely devoted to the field of experimental psychology. The leader of the expedition and his colleagues were provided with a complete set of ingenious apparatus designed to record observations on questions such as the visual acuity, colour-blindness, estimation of time, acuteness of hearing and smelling, sensibility to pain, and so forth. This is a field of investigation which in the case of races which we conventionally class as savage is almost unworked soil, and the value of such an inquiry conducted by competent scientific men employing the most advanced methods is sufficiently obvious. But besides what may be called the physical questions to which special attention was devoted, the volume before us everywhere shows the zeal with which ethno-