Page:The Annual Register 1899.djvu/509

 1899] LITEEATUKE. 85

historian, gives his philosophy of practical existence. The Map of Ufe (Longmans) discusses " Conduct and Character " in various social relations. It does not contain much that is original or freshly suggestive, and the standard by which conduct is to be guided and estimated seems for the most part to be a prudential one. But it gives a lucid statement of familiar truths, and its most interesting part is that which deals with moral compromise in war, in the law, in politics and in the Church.

Science.

The chief books which come under this head are those which con- cern man in the earliest stages of his history. Representing natural science proper, however, an important publication has appeared in a second volume of Tlie Scientific Memoirs of Thomas Henry Htucley (Macmillan). The memoirs are to be completed in four volumes and are being edited by Sir Michael Foster and Professor Ray Lankester. Those contained in this second volume range from 1867 to 1884. They embrace, therefore, that period of stir and stress in the scientific world which followed the publication of Darwin's " Origin of Species." Huxley plunged into the controversy as the leading champion of evolution ; and the papers in this volume are of great interest in recalling a critical time in the history of science. To the "International Scientific Series " (Kegan Paul) Sir John Lubbock has contributed one of his careful records of observation in On Buds sad Stipules. Comparatively little has been done to account for the infinitely varied characteristics of different plants which are used for purposes of classification. Sir John Lubbock has done as much as anybody to investigate their origin, and the chief object of this book is to carry on this work of explanation.

In the domain of pure anthropology Mr. A. H. Keane's Man: Past sad Present (Cambridge University Press) is the most important book of the year. Mr. Keane regards man as specifically one, and sprung from a single cradle-land. He utilises all that is now known as to pleistocene man, and traces his dispersal over the globe, and the evolution from this primitive type of the specialised races and tribes of history. The view that, even in the new world, the existence of man must be accounted for by migration from the other side, is endorsed in a very remarkable work by Mr. E. J. Payne called The History of the New World Called America (Clarendon Press), of which the second volume appeared early in 1899. Mr. Payne is treating his subject on an immense scale, and includes in his researches into the early history of America an inquiry of great value into the origin of language and the steps by which primitive man emerged from savagery. The tribes of Australia have of late years been found to throw much new light on the beliefs and customs of early man. Mr. Balder Spencer and Mr. F. J. Gillen record in The Native Tribes of Central Australia (Mac- mil Ian) the results of an intimate knowledge of the mystery and magic of the Australian aborigines. The remarkable facts adduced by them as to initiation ceremonies, and particularly as to totemism which assumes peculiar forms in Central Australia, mark a distinct advance in the study of the backward races and of early religious beliefs. New