Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/281

Rh kitchen middens, and long barrows. In these ancient dwelling places the weapons, utensils, ornaments, burial and hearth stones testify unerringly as to his mode of life. The degree of skill attained in his handiwork serves as a basis to differentiate the earlier races from those of later times. Men of the older stone age fashioned their weapons and tools in the rudest manner from rocks, merely chipping the edges. In the succeeding period, the neolithic, they had learned how to finish them by grinding; while in the bronze and iron ages they discovered the use of metals. It is somewhat remarkable that while it is a disputed point as to whether paleolithic man possessed a bow, it should be a well-attested fact that his wife used bone needles and knew how to sew.

These authentic sources of knowledge concerning our early ancestors are not the only data to be studied. Primitive races exist whose habits indicate what prehistoric man may have been like, and the author pleads, "It is sincerely to be hoped they will not be improved off the face of the earth before we have learned all that they can teach us about the past."

Nothing definite is known concerning the place of man's first appearance on the earth, but probably the northern hemisphere of the Old World can claim the honor. This may have occurred fifteen or twenty thousand years ago, but the allowance of eighty thousand odd years is deemed an unwarrantable waste of time. The volume contains ten full-page illustrations based upon such details as the researches have furnished. Primeval man, however, is reconstructed without a skull as a model for his features. This feat must have tested the creative power of the artist, but we are assured that even this has been done acceptably to the archaeologists, and we can not demur if it does not coincide with our ideal.

About one fifth of Macleod's History of Economics is really history. The rest is exposition of basal principles. Macleod declares that economics should and can be as exact as physical science, and he is putting forth vigorous efforts toward making it so. He says that most of the modern economists' work up to this time has been destructive, but that constructive labors are now urgently demanded and that the ground has been fully cleared for them. His present work opens with an essay on the method of investigation proper to economics. He gives much credit to Bacon for enunciating the principle that physical inductive science must precede and guide moral inductive science and protests against Mill's declaration that induction should not be taken as the method of political economy. Having placed economics among the inductive sciences, our author proceeds to lay down some general principles of reasoning which this position makes fitting for it. "The fundamental concepts and axioms of every science," he says, "must be perfectly general," and "no general concept and no general axiom must contain any term involving more than one fundamental idea." The clarifying of fundamental concepts, in fact, is the chief object of this treatise. The historical portion comes next. He rejects the insular idea that political economy began with Adam Smith, and gives to the French Economists the credit for establishing it as a science, although certain of its principles had been fixed from time to time before them. He states the doctrines of the Economists regarding exchanges, money, wealth,