Environment and Race: A Study of the Evolution, Migration, Settlement, and Status of theRaces of Man by Griffith TaylorReview by: R. B. DixonThe American Historical Review, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Apr., 1928), pp. 621-622Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1839405 .

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Tayllor: Environment and Race 62I

The editors of the volume have obviously surmounted many difficulties in this compilation, and they have made a valuable contribution in the direction of the hope expressed in their opening chapter: " the clarifica- tion and furtherance of the social sciences" as potentially " the contri- bution of the twentieth century to human thought and power ".

EDWIN E. AUBREY.

Environment and Race: a Study of the Evolution, Migration, Settle- ment, and Status of the Races of Alan. By GRIFFITH TAYLOR, D.Sc., B.E., B.A., F.R.G.S., Foundation Fellow of the Australian National Research Council, Head of the Department of Geog- raphy in the University of Sydney. (London: Oxford Univer- sity Press. I927. PP. xvi, 354. 2I S.)

IN this volume Professor Taylor has gathered together, adapted, and amplified a series of papers and addresses published by him between I9I9 and 1923. Although rather widely divergent in matter, they acquire a definite unity through the insistence on the overwhelming importance of environment in deterpnining the past, the present, and the future of the human race.

In the introduction the fundamental theory of the second part is out- lined. This is, that the evolution and dispersion of the races of man has been a process exactly analogous to that suggested by Matthews for the mammalia as a whole-a Central Asian centre of origin, with centrifugal migrations thence to all the rest of the world. On this theory, the oldest and most primitive races should be found in the extreme marginal areas, while the successively later and more highly evolved ones have a zonal distribution about the originating nucleus in which the latest and most highly developed form is to be found. As such, the Alpine-Mongoloid peoples, occupying the core of the Asiatic continent, are recognized. This zonal distribution of the'races of man is then said to parallel, and be conditioned by, a zonal distribution of environment, climate, and vegeta- tion around the same Asiatic centre. The author recognizes four primary races-Negroid, Hamitic, Iberian (Mediterranean), and Alpine-Mon- goloid-and conceives them to have been successively evolved in the Central Asiatic area, as a result of the shifting of environments and peoples consequent on the four advances and retreats of the ice-sheet during the glacial period. In part II. the general principles outlined are applied in detail to each of the various continents.

Although Professor Taylor's discussion of environmental conditions and changes is in general admirable (even if he is a little too ready to accept considerable historic changes), and the general principle of a wide dispersion of races and marginal distribution of older forms seems sound, the details and many of the conclusions can not, in the reviewer's opinion, be accepted, for the following reasons. The conclusions are reached in large measure only as a result of (I) a faulty conception of the criteria of race and the use of a false method, (2) pressing too closely the

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622 Reviews of Books

analogy of the spread of man to that of mammals as a whole, (3) over- generalization and over-simplification of actually complex phenomena, (4) a not infrequent disregard of historical and archaeological factors, and (5) the use of inaccurate or faulty data. The first misconception is fundamental. Professor Taylor pins his faith primarily upon the cephalic index alone, and furthermore to mere averages, which so often completely mask the real facts of variability. No theory of racial origins or dispersion which relies so largely on a single criterion, and which fails to take into account the range and character of variability in the criteria employed, can hope to achieve any valid results. The fact that after attaining the rudiments of culture man has become more and more in- dependent of environmental control makes the pressing of the original analogy with the lower animals increasingly untrue. That all the various races were developed in sequence, each from its predecessor in a single phylum, that this development took place in one single area, and that Central Asia was the area in question, are conclusions from which most anthropologists would, I think, rather strongly dissent.

If however one must, as I believe, deprecate the methods employed by Professor Taylor, and hesitate to accept his conclusions as to the origin and dispersion of races, his discussion of the history and present status of white settlement in Australia, as controlled by the factor of environ- ment, deserves high praise. He shows with admirable clearness the enormous environmental disabilities under which Australia suffers, and demonstrates the impossibility of its being able to support a large popu- lation. In the concluding section of the book, in which a forecast is made of the distribution and probable density of the white population of the world some centuries hence, the author has utilized an ingenious and valuable means of approach to the problem, although some of the results reached-such as a population of twenty-five million for the Utah area- seem to the reviewer open to considerable doubt.

R. B. DIXON.

Political Philosophy fromn Plato to Jeremty Benithamt. By Dr. GEZA ENGELMANN. Translated by KARL FREDERICK GEISER, Ph.D., Professor of Political Science in Oberlin College, with introduc- tions by OSCAR JASZI, Ph.D., Professor of Political Science in Oberlin College. (New York and London: Harper and Broth- ers. 1927. PP. xxiv, 398. $3.oo.) THE volume in hand presents in Elnglish a brief work written in Ger-

man by a scholarly young Hungarian lawyer and published in I923 under the title Meisterzeterke der Staatsphilosophie. The political masterpieces selected by Engelmann are thirteen, as follows: Plato's Republic, Aris- totle's Politics, Aquinas's Government of Princes, Hobbes's De Cive, Spinoza's Tractatus Politicuis, Locke's Civil Goverrnment, Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, Rousseau's Social Contract, The Federalist, and Ben- tham's Jntroduction to a Project for a Constitutional Code. All German

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