THE NATURAL HISTORY OP MAN.
THE class of readers for whom this little book is designed is not very perceptible. In form and appearance it looks like a juvenile work. The compiler too strenuously strives to show that the five leading varieties of the human race have been gradually produced from one parent stock, and are not, as LAURENCE and other anatomists maintain, distinct species. So far the view is intel- ligible to children, and affords an apt argument in favour of the Mosaic account of the Creation. But then the writer has an unscriptural theory that the first man was a black, and that the Negro is the common father of all flesh—a notion which will sorely puzzle the infant mind, whatever the anatomist may say to it.
But be the Natural History of Man designed for whom it may, it is an able and painstaking compilation, sufficiently scientific to give a clear idea of the structure of man in comparison with other animals, whilst its drier parts are agreeably varied by strik- ing facts and curious anecdotes connected with the main subject. In his opening chapter the author takes a view of man in relation to the inferior animals; not only as regards his conformation, but the qualities apparently arising from it, as his power of inhabiting every climate. The next is devoted to a general view of the genus Homo. The five following chapters exhibit him in his different classes,—beginning with the Caucasian, proceeding through the Mongolian, Ethiopian, and American varieties, and terminating with the Malay. Another chapter contains the writer's arguments against the theory of LAURENCE, and an exposition of his own. The work is concluded by an appendix, which presents an abstract of Dr. PRITCHARD'S parallel of the ancient Indians and Egyptians. It is a curious, and, for its sub- ject, not an uninteresting paper ; but it throws small light on its professed object, which is to point out the originators of the civilization of the Caucasian race, or, more strictly, of the Euro. peen tinnily.
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