CURRENT LITERATURE
The late Professor Elliot Smith (1871-1937) was known in his profession as a • brilliant anatomist and to the public as the expositor of an engaging theory of the diffusion of civilisation from an Egyptian centre. He impressed everyone who knew him or met him by his vigorous personality and his breadth of view. It can be well understood that Mr. Dawson's task of preparing a biographical record Of Elliot Smith (Cape, Jas. 6d.) was a difficult one, but it may be doubted whether he was right in enlisting a number of colleagues-to deal with the professor's various activities while limiting himself to a bare narrative. The composite work is doubtless accurate enough, but it is hard to read, and Elliot Smith himself, with all his force and fire, only emerges here and there, as in Professor Wood Jones's reminiscences of a skeleton-measuring campaign in Nubia, or in Mr. W. J. Perry's notes on his master's delight in controversy. Mr. Dawson has done well to reprint two short and lively pro-. noiincements by Elliot Smith on the NordiC race claims and the " Aryan " theory which Herr Hitler has officially made' his own, with such deplorable results.
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