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In culling the enormous range of literature concerning extant primitive races and providing a succinct, well integrated summary, Mr. Page, who is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the author of four previous books on geography and anthropology, has performed a valuable service to workers in all fields having at any point recourse to anthropology. The work forms a concise recapitulation, in lively running form, of the essential material about these societies as adduced in travel surveys and geographical memoirs. The text is lucid and direct, free of unnecessary technicalities and notes. A useful bibliography is appended in which titles are given in relation to their bearing on corresponding chapters in the text.
The different stages of development obtaining among the peoples represented, in regard to the economic basis of their culture, order the textual divisions. Thus under the headings of Hunters and Collectors are discussed the Asiatic and African pygmies; certain non-pygmy hunters found in tropical forests; Australian primitives; the Kalahari Desert Bushmen; and the Plains' Indians. The next section, Hunters and Fishers, deals with the British Columbian coastal Indians, the Fuegians, and the Eskimos. In Part III the subject is primitive cultivation as evidenced in the cultural economic formations developed in Amazonia, Equatorial Africa, among the gardeners and fishers of the South Seas, and further, among special Melanesian and Polynesian groups. The life of native herder tribes of Arabia, the Steppes, and the Tundra is the subject of Part IV, entitled Herders.
Here is provided a groundwork of carefully sifted factual material that will be of marked value to the psychiatrically oriented student of primitive societies. Although there is admittedly little concerning the psychical development and systems of the peoples presented—the author for example has excluded the discussion of primitive religion because of the great variance of systemic interpretat