NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS.
This is the second and revised edition of a valuable, widely noticed, and in some cases severely criticised book, of which the first edition appeared in 1895; and although the author, a man of the widest reading and acquaintance with his general subject, is not strictly a physical anthropologist, he has still supplied one of the best introductions to the study of Man that even modern zoologists can obtain. This revised edition is without those instances of lapsus calami which were pointed out when the work first appeared, references which the author doubtless welcomed, as he himself has written here and there in a freely controversial style.
Man's position in the animal kingdom is sought to be determined from the purely zoological standpoint. "That he is an animal, and as such must be related to other animals, is no discovery of modern science. Then the schoolmen defined him as animal rationale, a definition which the ethnologist may accept without hesitation as at least partly true. What modern science has done is to give precision and completeness to this definition, by fixing the place of Man as an animal in the class of mammals, and by separating him, mainly in virtue of his exclusive possession of articulate speech, from other animals to whom the reasoning faculty can scarcely be denied. Man will accordingly here be considered as a rational animal possessing the faculty of articulate speech." These sentences may be taken as Mr. Keane's prolegomena, and evolution is used as the argument throughout.
The book is divided into two Parts, "Fundamental Problems" and "The Primary Ethnical Groups." In the first the evidence for the antiquity of Man is very fully and ably treated, and a feature of great convenience to British zoologists is a descriptive list of the principal areas in Britain which palæolithic Man is
