1 84 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [n. S., I, 1899
and bark ; others exhibit the distribution of the bow within the area of the Congo basin, the Malayo-Nigritian style of dwellings, masks, cloth- ing, tattooing, stringed-instruments, wooden drums, sirimbas, and knives. The author distinguishes seven distinct types of architecture south of Niger river, and their distribution is shown on one of the charts. Still another chart illustrates the range of banana and millet culture, as well as of pastoral life.
When a few more works of this character have been presented, much light will have been shed on the ethnography of the Dark Continent.
A. S. Gatschet.
Truth and Error or The Science of Intellection. By J. W. Powell. Chicago : The Open Court Publishing Company. 1898. 12 , 428 pp.
This is a book of great and vigorous originality. The work of a special investigator in several branches of science (in two of which he has attained eminence) and a sympathetic student of the other branches, its foundation is broad and strong, and its author's warrant for putting it forth as an epistemology would seem to be ample. It is not primarily anthropologic, save in that it recognizes throughout the psychic factor which enters every sound system of interpreting nature ; yet it is designed to serve as a basis for the classification of anthropology as well as the other sciences. Traversing the sphere of human knowledge as it does, condensed by years of synthesis as it has been, and written for the physicist and naturalist and metaphysician as it was, the book is not easily summarized ; but three of its features may be noted briefly : 1. Throughout the author attempts to interpret nature from its mani- festations in the human mind, and to interpret the mind as the most delicate and complex product of the endless interactions of nature — /. e. y the author sees mind as the reflection of nature, and seeks to interpret each in terms of the other. 2. Accepting the current scientific doctrine of the conservation of energy, the author extends and modifies the current form of the law so far as to recognize the persistence of energy in the particle and in the form of motion ever-changing in direction, but constant in quantity. 3. Accepting the results of modern researches in psychology, the author out-passes some of his contemporaries by recognizing consciousness (or rather the potentiality of consciousness, as this term is commonly used) as one of the primary attributes of the ultimate particle ; the potential consciousness becom- ing effective with organization, and culminating in effectiveness only in the most highly developed organs of the highest organisms. Most
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