Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/874

852 on Imperial Expansion we are told of three "world crises" in our history when we were confronted with momentous questions. The first was after the Revolution. The second came through the growth of slavery. The third is upon us now." It is not the conquest of Spain, not the disposition of the spoils of victory which first concerns us. It is the spirit that lies behind it. Shall our armies go where our institutions can not? Shall territorial expansion take the place of democratic freedom? Shall our invasion of the Orient be merely an incident, an accident of a war of knight-errantry, temporary and exceptional? Or is it to mark a new policy—the reversion from America to Europe, from democracy to imperialism?" President Jordan has an answer to the question, What are we to do in the shape affairs have assumed? The right thing would be "to recognize the independence of the Philippines, under American protection, and to lend them our army and navy and our wisest counselors; not our politicians, but our jurists, our teachers, with foresters, electricians, manufacturers, mining engineers, and experts in the various industries.… The only sensible thing to do would be to pull out some dark night and escape from the great problem of the Orient as suddenly and as dramatically as we got into it." Yet President Jordan recognizes that some great changes in our system, are inevitable, and belong to the course of natural progress. They must not be shirked, but should be met manfully, soberly, with open eyes. A paper on Colonial Lessons of Alaska presents as an object lesson the muss we have made with colonial government in that Territory.

A. H. Keane's Man Past and Present is a part fulfillment of a promise held out in his Ethnology, the first volume of the Cambridge Geographical Series, that it might be followed by another dealing more systematically with the primary divisions of mankind. In it the "four varietal divisions" of man over the globe are treated more in detail, with the primary view of establishing their independent specialization in their several geographical zones, and of elucidating the difficult questions associated with the origins and interrelations of the chief subgroups. The work consequently deals to a large extent with the prehistoric period, when the peoples had already been fully constituted in their primeval homes and had begun their subsequent developments and migratory movements. The author has further sought to elucidate those general principles which are concerned with the psychic unity, the social institutions, and religious ideas of primitive and later peoples. The two principles, already insisted upon in the Ethnology, of the specific unity of all existing varieties of the human family and the dispersion of their generalized precursors over the whole world in Pleistocene times are borne in view throughout. Subsequent to this dispersion, the four primary divisions of man have each had its Pleistocene ancestor, from whom each has sprung independently and divergently by continuous adaptation to their several environments. Great light is believed to have been thrown on the character of the earliest men by the discovery of the Pithecanthropus erectus, and this is supplemented as to the earliest acquirements by Dr. Noetling's discovery, in 1894, of the works of Pliocene man in upper Burmah. The deductions made from these discoveries strengthen the view Mr. Keane has always advocated, that man began to spread over the globe after he