Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/357

No. 3.] admirable statistics of the Japanese government show that in 1889 there were in Japan 107,478 divorces, or more than three to every ten marriages. And the number in the preceding years was still larger.

Some other errors in the verifiable statements of the author might be pointed out, but these instances may suffice to indicate that traveller's tales about savage peoples, however conscientiously gathered and sifted, form but a questionable basis for a science. Yet this is what the author claims for his subject, that the history of human civilization may be so treated as to constitute it a "science in the highest sense of the term" (p. 1).