Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/254

 2 1 8 Reviews.

indirectly by the investigations and hypotheses of Pitt-Rivers (to give him the name by which he will be known to posterity) who have not actually read his papers; it was, therefore, a happy idea of our Oxford colleagues to take the opportunity of the establishing of a diploma in Anthropology in the University of Oxford to republish them in a convenient form, in order to supply the needs of candidates and of the numerous visitors to the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford ; and they are right in considering that they will "appeal to a far wider public as a brief and authentic statement of their author's discoveries."

The volume opens with an Introduction by Mr. Henry Balfour, which also formed the main portion of his Presidential Address to the Anthropological Section of the Cambridge Meeting of the British Association in 1904. No one is better fitted to expound the views of the founder than is the present Curator of the Pitt-Rivers Museum, who not only continues and extends the original collections, but has published several model papers on similar lines based upon careful investigations and upon the specimens with which he has enriched the Museum. Mr. Balfour, in his exposition of the methods of Pitt-Rivers, warns us that "it must not be supposed that he was unaware of the danger of possibly mistaking mere accidental resemblances for morphological affinities, and that he assumed that because two objects, per- haps from widely separated regions, appeared more or less identical in form, and possibly in use, they were necessarily to be considered as members of one phylogenetic group. . . . The association of similar forms into the same series has, therefore, a double significance. On the one hand, the sequence of related forms is brought out, and their geographical distribution illustrated, throwing light, not only upon the evolution of types, but also upon the interchange of ideas by transference from one people to another, and even upon the migration of races. On the other hand, instances in which two or more peoples have arrived independently at similar results, are brought prominently forward, not merely as interest- ing coincidences, but also as evidence pointing to the phylogenetic unity of the human species, as exemplified by the tendency