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Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/139

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LITERARY NOTICES.
129

Nashville about two years ago. The material worthy of illustration accumulated so rapidly that it was found impossible to do justice to it in the modest pamphlet that was contemplated. It became necessary, also, to consider the general subject of ancient monuments and antiquities in Tennessee, in order properly to introduce the new material discovered, and thus make the publication useful to a larger class of readers. The people whose relics are described here are called by the author the Stone-Grave race, because their dead were placed in cists or box-shaped graves built of stone slabs, and sometimes constructed with much care. A hundred or more of these graves are occasionally found, deposited in several tiers or layers, in a single burial mound. The utensils and treasures laid away with the bodies are generally well preserved, and "tell the story of domestic life in the Cumberland and Tennessee Valleys with remarkable exactness, and unravel secrets that the most imposing monuments of the native races have failed to disclose." Besides the graves, the remains of the forts, villages, and settlements of the same people have been discovered in considerable numbers; and, on the whole, Tennessee appears to have afforded one of the most fruitful fields that the American archaeologist has been privileged to explore. The articles—inscribed stones, idols, images, totems, potteries, pipes, implements of chipped stone, smooth stone, copper, bone, and shell—betoken an artistic taste and technical skill beyond that of our Indians or of the mound-builders of the States farther north, and are more on the level of the best New Mexican work. Among the most remarkable of them are some finely finished large flints, from sixteen to twenty inches long, which the author designates as scepters, and others equal to them in degree, which he classifies as ceremonial implements. The most remarkable, perhaps, are the shell gorgets, carved with intricate figures, in which the human form may be discerned, the style of which suggests Mexican and Central American work. One of these, from the MacMahon Mound, Sevierville, represents two human figures in combat, and is regarded as the highest example of aboriginal art ever found north of Mexico. A unique stone in the collection of the Tennessee Historical Society has engraved upon it the representation of a group of mound-builders, with their banners, weapons, costumes, and manner of dressing the hair clearly shown. The author, who is an original investigator, and not liable to be deceived, vouches for the authenticity of all that he describes. A chapter is devoted to the study of the ancient houses, which are compared with those of the Mandans, and the aboriginal trade, which seems to have been co-extensive with the continent. In age the people were probably pre-Columbian, but may have lived down to the days of the Spanish explorers. In ethnic relations they were a branch of the general stock of our Indians, in a more advanced stage of civilization than any of them now are, but not in other respects differing more from them than some of the tribes differ from others.

The Criminal. By Havelock Ellis. Contemporary Science Series. New York: Scribner & Welford. Pp. 33V. Price, $1.25.

Mr. Ellis has attempted in this work to present to the English reader a critical summary of the results of the science now commonly called criminal anthropology. The study of the problems of this science—which deals with the criminal as he is in himself and as he becomes in contact with society, and with the social bearings of the subject—has been carried on with great activity during the past fifteen years in many countries, and has given rise to a considerable number of elaborate and thorough-going treatises, most of which are inaccessible to general English readers, and, by reason of their magnitude or of the special, detailed character of the research, are not likely to become familiar. Mr. Ellis has reviewed them and picked out the conclusions to which they lead with much skill and apparently without prepossession in favor of any special theory. Besides doing his workman's work in a workmanlike manner, he has shown a capacity to handle the subject independently, as one who has made himself master of it, and has matured his own manner of regarding it. First, the chief varieties of the criminal are enumerated; the causes of crime are classed as cosmic—the influence of the external organic world; biological—the personal peculiarities of the