184 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [N. s., 22, 1920
at pains to emphasize, p. 214) this possibility is spurned, and because the name for manioc may be of foreign origin, the plant itself must be also. Contradiction has no terrors for the author, so that we find (pp. 238-239) that "there cannot be the slightest doubt" but that the sweet-potato was introduced into Asia and the East Indies from the Congo by the Spanish and Portuguese voyagers of the sixteenth century, while later (p. 261) he says that "it can be proved, beyond any possibility of cavil, that the sweet-potato was cultivated in Asia before the discovery of America." That the yam and sweet-potato were both widely cultivated in the Polynesian area prior to the first appearance of Europeans in the Pacific is not mentioned in Professor Wiener's whole argument, and the fact that actual specimens of sweet-potatoes and peanuts are found in pre- historic Peruvian tombs and are represented, together with manioc apparently, on Peruvian pottery of similar age seems quite unknown to the learned author, who triumphantly proves their non-existence on linguistic grounds!
Space is lacking to discuss adequately the purely philological portions of the volume. In general it may be said that the author depends in the main solely on similarities in sound, and quite disregards all questions of phonetic laws or the principles of word composition a method whose great untrustworthiness linguistic students have long recognized. One or two examples of the author's methods will suffice to show the quality of his scholarship. Referring (p. 143) to the terms uppowoc, uhpooc, apooke used for tobacco in Virginia, he says: "One need only look at the juxta- position of tobacco-apooke to convince oneself that the second is an apoco- pation of the first, the t appearing as a pronominal suffix" (sic). Further explanation of this pronominal "suffix" would doubtless interest students of Algonkian languages, but quite apart from this, the whole statement, if it means anything, would seem to imply that the word tobacco was derived from this Virginia Indian word apookel Elsewhere it is always taba, tawa from which the American Indian words- are supposed to be de- rived, and not from' tobaccol Again, as proof of the Negro origin of Indian words used by Ramon Pane, Professor Wiener cites (p. 160) the Indian word cobo "a sea snail" and correlates it with the Malinke kobo "nom d'un insecte coleoptere"! To other minds the association is hardly obvious!
It is neither necessary nor profitable to bring forward further criti- cism. To point out all the errors of fact and reasoning, correct all the misunderstandings, misrepresentations and mistranslations, and refute the conclusions would require a volume in itself. Professor Wiener has
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