REVIEWS 6ll
blood- vengeance, etc. The custom was probably universal to eat ene- mies, and also friends who died by violence or were not too much wasted by disease. The necessity of self-preservation would prevent extensive murder for cannibalism within the tribe, except in case of the aged, invalid, criminals, and the deformed. It is impossible that super- stition should have led man to cannibalism, if periodic hunger had not led him to it long before.
This paper is valuable even more from the methodological stand- point than as a contribution to folk-psychology. The data of ethnol- ogy are singularly difficult of management, because of the unreliability of sources and the vastness of the material ; and many writers who, like Herbert Spencer, have attempted to handle these materials compara- tively, have, like him, exhibited, in the main, only the facts corrob- orative of their own opinions, in this respect falling into a worse error than those editors of the last generation who, when they found a manuscript, changed it to the best of their knowledge and ability before giving it to the public. It may be that Dr. Steinmetz' conclu- sions are not all valid, but he has presented practically all the facts involved, and the article is unsurpassed as a model for ethnological research. W. I. THOMAS.
The History of Mankind. By FRIEDRICH RATZEL. Translated
by A. J. Butler. Introduction by E. B. Tylor. London :
Macmillan & Company (Ltd.), 1896. Vol. I, 8vo., pp.
486. Cuts, map, and nine colored plates.
FOR ten years past Professor Ratzel's great Vblkerkunde has been a
veritable mine of information for the student. It was really the only
comprehensive manual of universal ethnography. Valuable as the
text was its value was greatly enhanced by the numerous illustrations.
Notwithstanding faults, and even some errors, it was a useful work.
The second German edition has lately been published and is now
appearing in an English translation. The three volumes of the first
edition have been condensed into two, and the order of treatment has
been somewhat modified. The first volume of this translation is
before us. It is a handsome book, well printed on good paper with
many fine cuts, mostly made from objects in ethnographic museums,
or from portraits of the peoples whose life is described. Nine of the
beautiful colored plates of the first edition are reproduced ; they
