of the Aryo-Semitic race, to whom, and not to any Mongolian or Negro peoples, are really due all the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean. Dr. Brinton believed, likewise, that the Etruscans of ancient Italy were close kinsmen of the Libyans and Berbers of northwestern Africa, whose love of liberty and village and tribal institutions proved them to be very near the primitive Aryan stock itself. He was one of the first to clearly perceive the implications of the “Eurafrican” theory. Asia, too, he touched. Among his briefer studies are to be found the following: The Taki, Svastika, and the Cross in America” (Proc. Amer. Philos. Soc., Dec. 1888); “On various Supposed Relations between the American and Asiatic Races” (Mem. Cong. Anthr., 1893). Almost the last writings to leave his hands were an article in the “American Anthropologist” for October, 1898, on “The Peoples of the Philippines,” and another in the first volume of the new series of the same journal, résuméing “Professor Blumentritt’s Studies of the Philippines.” The opinions of these two broad-minded ethnologists ought to have some weight in the settlement of the new question in the East, and they were both very favorably disposed towards the Filipinos, regarding them as well fitted for self-government.
To the general subject of Anthropology and Ethnology Dr. Brinton contributed some of the most suggestive and inspiring literature of the last quarter of a century. The broad comprehensiveness, genial power of concentration, and frequent anticipation of truths which needed to wait years for their actual demonstration, make his “Races and Peoples,” published in 1890, the best brief work of its kind in existence. No ethnologist, not even in Germany, succeeded so well in condensing the best from a wide field embracing the chief languages of the civilized world. The “Current Notes on Anthropology,” which Dr. Brinton continued, until a short time before his death, to publish in “Science” (New Series), were admirable as brief presentations of what was most important in the recent literature of the subject. His reviews of books in “Science,” the “Journal of American Folk-Lore,” the “American Antiquarian,” etc., evidence his ability to see the weaknesses and to discern the budding genius where others might have discovered only the first. One side of Dr. Brinton’s activity that can scarcely be overestimated was the willingness and helpfulness exhibited in his extensive and sometimes quite elaborate correspondence—hardly a student in the last fifteen or twenty years of the new thought in Anthropology to whom his kind and inspiring word did not come again and again. For them, too, he set the example of untiring patience in research, and readiness to acknowledge error when conscious of it himself. At the time of his death, Dr. Brinton was engaged upon a general work on
