PRINCESS MARY OF TECK.
A Memoir of Her Royal Highness Princess Mary Adelaide of Teck : based on her Private Diaries and Letters. By C. Kinloch Cooke, BA., LL.M. 2 vole., with Portraits and Illustrations. (John Murray. 32e.)—A biography of the Duchess of Teck is welcome because it brings us once more in touch with a warm heart, a gracious manner, and a singularly charming and lovable character. It is pleasant to read the Princess Mary's intimate letters to personal friends, and to find how entirely the interior of her life corresponded with the exterior, which was so familiar, so popular, and so representatively royal. " I am Princess Mary Adelaide of Great Britain and Ireland, and I feel it here," Princess Mary said once to a girl playfellow, striking herself on her chest to show the exact spot where she felt her royalty to be located. But, in fact, she was a Princess all over, inside and out. And, like a royal personage in a fairy story, she went through life shedding royal smiles and royal kindnesses on great and small. And the best of it was that her royal smiles were entirely human, and her royal kindnesses—most of them—the simplest acts of charity and courtesy such as any human being with a heart as warm and a sympathy as alert may render to another. This memoir is full of anecdotes, but very few of them have wit or satire for their point. They almost all illus- trate the natural kindliness of the Princess Mary, and her• husband, and their daughter, to all their friends and dependants and the chance " neighbour " by the wayside. Now it is the Princess Mary and her mother—the Duchess of Cambridge—who are overtaken by heavy rains in Kew Gardens, and, while flying for shelter to Cambridge Cottage, observe two little girls in similar plight,—only without cloaks. They instantly hail the children, take them, under their wraps, and carry them home to be warmed, dried, and given tea, before being returned to their parents safe and sound. Later it is the Duchess of Teck and her children who pick up sticks to help a poor woman in Richmond Park ; or push a perambulator for a nursemaid in difficulties: or sion to the wkole earth, in Races of Man, by J. Deniker, Sc.D. (W. Scott, 6s.), a volume of "The Contemporary Science Series," and described as "an Outline of Anthropology and Ethnology." In anthropology, certainly, science has removed us a long way from the definiteness with which in uninstructed days we used to map out the divisions of the human race. Dr. Deniker is manifestly content to accumulate facts ; to ethnological theories he is distinctly averse. Even the controversy between the mono- genists and polygenists seems to be insoluble ; "we are confined to hypothesis without a single positive fact for its solution." The most obvious test, fertility between different groups, has never been, and probably never will be, really applied. "Almost all the facts," says our author, "are borrowed from cross-breeding between the whites and other races. No one has ever tried cross- breeding between the Australians and Lapps, etc." Of the existence of a tailed race he is distinctly incredulous. The biped attitude is inconsistent with the tail, though, of course, individuals now and then are found who simulate this pheno- menon. And there are some tribes which have a tail-like append- age as part of their full dress. The illustrations are numerous, well executed, and very interesting. A table of comparative heights in Appendix i. shows a variation from 4 ft. 5 in. among the Akkas in the Monbutto country to 5 ft. 10 in. among " Scotch agriculturists of Galloway" : the " inhabitants of the United Kingdom " stand seventh from the maximum with an average of 5 ft. 7+ in.
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