Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/870

848 reader, at least in America and England, demands much more than he did twenty years ago.

The work is so full of interesting material that it is impossible in a review of this nature to do more than quote here and there. An illustration of the persistence of certain traits in man is shown in the Tedas or Tebus, which are supposed to be the Troglodytes described by Herodotus. "They are to-day no poorer, no richer, no wiser, no more ignorant than they have been these thousands of years; they have acquired nothing in addition to what they possessed then." He shows in contrast the Europeans emerging from savagery in an exalted place among the peoples of the world. By such a picture do we see the persistence of conditions identical in every respect to those of the animals below us. While a form of Brachiopod may persist nearly unchanged from the lowest geological horizons to the present day, other forms of life may pass through rapid changes and become extinct. A group may go through slow and even changes like the ammonites of the Jura and finally culminate in rapid and extraordinary modifications in form.

In contrasting the inertness of the Chinese with the progressive European nations, he quotes Voltaire as "hitting the point" when he says that "Nature has given the Chinese the organs for discovering all that is useful to them but not for going any further." Peschel presents these contrasts in a clearer way perhaps when he says: "Of all highly civilized nations the Chinese owe least to foreign promptings, whereas until the thirteenth century we—that is to say the Europeans, and especially the northern Europeans—owed almost everything but our language to the teaching of other nations. . . . Since our intellectual awakening, since we have come forward as the propagators of the treasures of culture, we have indefatigably toiled with the sweat of our brows in search of something, the very existence of which was unsuspected by the Chinese, and which they would think dear at a platter of rice. This invisible object we term causality. We have admired the Chinese for an incalculable number of inventions and have appropriated them, but we are not indebted to them for a single theory or a single glance into the connection or the first causes of phenomena."

The statement is made that Chinese ships are said to have been cast away on the northwest coast of America. In every case the junks which have been cast away on our western coast or found drifting in the North Pacific are Japanese junks, not Chinese. A reference is made to glazed tiles associated with ancient pottery having been exhumed in the Mississippi Valley near Natchez. As a matter of fact the tile is post-Columbian.

The arrangement of cuts is somewhat confusing; they are not always found with the text. As the cuts are not numbered, there is no way of referring to them in the text. On the other hand, a good legend accompanies each illustration, and usually full credit is given to its derivation. References to special works on the subject treated would have added greatly to the value of the book. Thus on page 287, Volume II, the author says in speaking of the Hottentots: "If we may believe Kolb, the fortunate hunter undergoes an 'alterative process' at the hands of some old fellow-tribesman in the form of a hydraulic application which does not bear more minute description." Is he referring to Peter Kolben's remarkable work on the Present State of the Cape of Good Hope, an English translation of which