Abstract
Zsitschrift für Ethnologie (1873). The fifth number of the journal for last year is of less than average importance to English readers, since the principal article—a most valuable and comprehensive one on the descriptive ethnology of Bengal—is a translation of Colonel Dalton's digest of the official reports drawn up by the different Commissioners of the province, and published at the cost of the Indian Government. This work, which supplies information that can nowhere else be found in regard to the tribes occupying the Brahmaputra and Gangetic valleys, must henceforth be considered as indispensable to every student of Indian ethnology, and the editors of the Zeitschrift have done good service in making it known to their readers. In an article on a proposed improvement in the methods of craniometry now in use, Dr. Jhering passes in review the difference in the values of the indices, proposed by Blumenbach, Retzius, Broca, and others, for the definition of Dolichocephalic and Brachycephalic types. His three main propositions are briefly these:— 1. All cranial measurements must be projected in a line that is parallel or vertical to the horizontal base of the cranium. 2. The most important maximum and minimum dimensions sbould be obtained per se, and without reference to distances from definite anatomical points. 3. For all parts not in the medial plane, the percentage of lengths and heights must be given at the points where such parts intersect these diameters. Dr. Jhering thinks that it is time finally to set aside the theory transmitted from Blumenbach, and through Retzius to the present day, that every race possesses at once a special language, and a special type of cranium. According to his viewit is never possible to determine with certainty from the form of the skull the precise race from which an individual has sprung, and in his opinion the problems which ought to engage the attention of future students of crarjology are the determination of the mean cranial type of each race; and the definition of the limits within which each special type varies among different races. Finally the author wishes to show that craniology is not competent to determine questions of race, but is merely to be accepted as an auxiliary science to anthropology. The learned missionary, Th. Jellinghaus, to whom we are already indebted for many valuable contributions to our knowledge of the languages spoken by the outlying tribes of our vast empire in India, gives in this number a short account of the language of the Munda Kohls of Chota Nagpore. The peculiarities of their tongue seem to be a distinct dual for all three persons: the formation of the plural and dual by the addition of an abbreviated form of the third personal pronoun; the insertion of the letter p with the vocal accent for the formation of the plural and dual of certain nouns and adjectives; the interpellation of the letter n in the root-syllable of the verb to form the abstract noun. The units of the Munda Kohls' numeral system are 10 and 20. The author describes these people as kind and simple in their social relations with one another. Herr Virchow draws attention to a specimen of a synostolic cranium as the form has been figured and described by J. B. Davis in his work on “Synostolic Crania among Aboriginal Races of Man”(Haarlem, 1865). As this skull belonged to a rachitic child, and similar skulls, in which the calvaria was entirely obliterated, and the cranial bones were thickened outwardly, are preserved in the Berlin and other Pathologico-Anatomical collections, and were taken from rachitic subjects, Herr Virchow considers that such forms must be held to be quite independent of ethnological peculiarities, and that their occurrence amongst savage or aboriginal races must be ascribed to the frequent presence amonst them of rachidsm—a fact to which Pruner-Bey has already drawn attention. We canno close our notice of the contents of this number without mentioning an interesting communication by Dr. Brehm in regard to his experience—based on an eight years' acquaintance—of the habits of the Chimpanzee under confinement. The last individual which fell under his notice, and which died at the age of four from pulmonary disease, showed, in many respects, an aptitude of comprehension, a docility and a capability of practising the ordinary usages of daily life which made the animal an interesting and wholly unobjectionable inmate of Dr. Virchow's house, where he ran about with little more surveillance than would have been awarded to a human child of the same age. The result of the learned author's experience of this, and other individuals of the race is, that although not human, there is very much of the element of humanity in the Chimpanzee.
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Scientific Serials . Nature 9, 233–234 (1874). https://doi.org/10.1038/009233a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/009233a0