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If investigation of the details of discovery, and of the geological conditions in which it was found, confirm the view that it belongs to the third great geological epoch into which pre-recent geological time is divided, and if an examination of

the form of the skull shows that it is really

of primitive type, it would mean that the oldest known human remains have been discovered in South America, antedating by many thousands of years Pithecanthropus erectus, the earliest ancestor of man at present known, and the fossil tooth said to be human or subhuman in type and of Pliocene Age recently found in Nebraska. It is hardly necessary, however, to remind our readers that evidence for the existence of man in Tertiary times in South America, which has been brought forward up to the present, has not hitherto withstood criticism.

'DRESS DRUNKENNESS'

THE financial difficulties of a lady who aspired to be the best-dressed woman in London,' and ended in going to court for an enormous modiste's bill which her husband declined to pay, leads Mr. E. T. Raymond into some salutary reflections in the columns of the London Outlook. Mr. Raymond sets up a distinction between genuine good taste and mere vulgarity which is worth considering. In the course of his argument he has occasion to quote some severe comments by Lady Bathurst, the proprietress of the London Morning Post. But let Mr. Raymond speak for himself:

'It was truly remarked of the nineteenth-century Englishman that he had a defective taste for pleasure, and a most marked taste for expense. The peculiarity was doubtless due to the coincidence of a Puritan religion and an aristocratic polity in a country of rapidly expanding wealth. The one indulgence Puritanism does not deny is pride and vainglory; and since the rich Puritan had little chance or temp

tation to spend money in the ways of the wicked he naturally inclined, being bound to advertise his wealth somehow, for solemn stateliness of living. Hence the acres of Victorian mahogany dining-tables and the elaboration of the gold-and-marble console tables of fifty

years ago.

'With the decline of Puritanism the taste for pleasure has grown, but the taste for expense is still more notable, and there are multitudes of people who even estimate their pleasure in terms of expense. They enjoy a dear bad dinner much better than a cheap and good one. Like Elagabalus, who would only eat sea-fish at immense distances from the sea, they value luxuries merely because they are costly; they rush for tasteless strawberries in February, and scorn the full-flavored fruit in July. One often hears such a remark as “We had such a night, and did n't get out under ten pounds"; and perhaps a majority of people will smoke a bad cigar at three-and-sixpence with more reverence and satisfaction than a good one at eighteenpence.

"Thus with the frank Hedonists. When we go higher, of course, expense is the accepted standard of desirability. Rembrandt or Velasquez would still be eagerly sought if good examples fetched from five to twenty guineas at Christie's. But it is certain that few rich men would buy them. Somebody would still want a Shakespeare folio if the market price were half-a-guinea, and the first edition of the Compleat Angler if it appeared in the booksellers' catalogues for ninepence. But no ordinary millionaire, here or in America, would give such valueless rubbish houseroom.

'All this must be remembered in justice to the lady whose gigantic dressbills moved one of our most cultured judges to a fine piece of comminatory prose. Mr. Justice McCardie's condemnation has been echoed by no less a

social authority than Lady Bathurst. Mrs. Nash spent from two to three thousand a year on dress. Her craving for self-embellishment, according to the judge, was insatiable; dress and dress alone was her end in life; she sought felicity in the ceaseless change of trivial fashions; self-decoration was her vision, her aim, and her creed. "How very foolish," says Lady Bathurst in effect. "The silly woman wants to be the best-dressed woman in London. Was there ever such futility? Nobody who is anybody in London ever heard of her, and would not have been at all impressed by all her finery if she had happened to penetrate to the beau monde."

'But clearly the case is not, as the judge assumed, one of simple passion for dress. Nobody with a passion for dress would have sixty evening gowns at a time, or order boots by the gross. No woman can conveniently wear more than one dress at night, or more than one pair of boots. Reckoning six nights to the week, sixty dresses would last ten weeks. Some of them would inevitably become a little old-fashioned - as things go in the world that takes such things quite seriously- before they were worn at all. Moreover, a woman who really loved dress for its own sake could hardly find it in her heart to discard something which thoroughly suited her after only one or two wearings.

"This lady's trouble was not, as the judge thought, an abnormal and even crazy desire to express her personality in clothes. Personality would have been better expressed by half-a-dozen well-meditated gowns. Nor was the extravagance necessarily incurred, as Lady Bathurst suggests, to impress the beau monde, or what the lady thought was the beau monde. What Mrs. Nash really suffered from was an extreme

form of the very common taste for expense, taking, through some failure of imagination, a concentrated and monotonous expression. . . . If Mrs. Nash had really belonged to the beau monde, if her husband's income had been fifty thousand a year instead of a poor twelve hundred or so, she would still be criminally foolish and vulgar to spend more than, say, six hundred a year on her personal adornment.

"Why? Why should there be especially "something so selfish and mean, apart from vanity, in spending enormous sums on clothes"? What differentiates such expenditure from the waste of money in any other direction

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as with clothes become the more important the higher the status of the owner, are a satisfaction of pride and æstheticism. Philosophically it is no more vulgar to be overfine in one's dress than in one's rooms and furnishings. The one thing may seem more trivial than the other, but the essence of the matter is the same.

'Dress, in short, is subject to the same rules of taste that apply to everything else; and the ridicule which rightly attaches to the dress drunkard is simply the ridicule which should attach to any other form of the vulgarity which associates the idea of expense with the ideas of beauty, dignity, or enjoyment.'

Il Mio Diario di Guerra, by Benito Mussolini. Milan: Casa editrice Imperia, 1923. Lire 15. [Corriere della Sera]

NATURALLY, knowing that the soldier who wrote this diary is to-day the head of the Italian Government, the reader will look for 'politics' in his notes. But there are none. If any political ideas are to be found, they are so closely connected with things of war and patriotic passion that one is unwilling to apply the term 'politics' at all. These short notes make the impression of pencil sketches, nervous but firm, through which the future complete picture can be guessed. The author remembers Mazzini's words: 'Great things are not accomplished by means of protocols but by divining the spirit of the age. The secret of might is will....' He says further: "To-day the dirty and bloody trenches engulf human lives. But the Europe of to-morrow will see the flower of greater liberty grow from these pathetic furrows.'

Mussolini, the soldier, is skeptical of amulets and says that 'one is just as good as another in the trenches.' When the chaplain presents him with a pious booklet of religious instructions for soldiers, he faithfully copies these in his diary, adding: 'I do not comment upon this, I merely transcribe,' and further adds: 'Who has not paid his tribute to the superstitions of trench life? I confess: I also wear on my little finger a ring made from a horseshoe nail.'

But the true value of the book is in the austere and ardent sense of war for a right cause that emanates from the simply and vigorously written pages. He is a soldier who sees the drawbacks but knows that he is not there in order to criticize. He makes his observations but does not press them. The thing that matters is for everyone to do his duty. His notes make the reader feel the supreme significance of the wounded men's stoicism, to which he alludes with manly emotion. His characterization of the fighters' morale is always short, but gives a complete psychoanalysis that would require pages by another writer.

Once in a while a note reveals sentiment - not sentimentality—always discreetly worded and never affected, as when, on a rainy Christmas morning, to the accompaniment of incessant cannonade, Mussolini sits down to write a few fragmentary childhood reminiscences.

Recent Revelations on European Diplomacy, by G. P. Gooch. London: 1923. 1s. 6d. net.

[Times Literary Supplement]

THE proceedings of the British Institute of International Affairs, a society which was

founded shortly after the conclusion of the Peace Conference, are, we understand, generally kept strictly confidential. An exception, however, has been made in the case of this paper by Mr. Gooch, which was read at a meeting of the Institute and is reprinted from the Journal. Mr. Gooch has managed within a comparatively short space to give an admirable critical survey of the more important foreign books which have appeared during the last few years. The whole literature is one of great interest and importance; never before have we had so full a revelation as to great events so soon after they took place. The literature is also of immediate and real value for its bearing on the problem of what is called 'responsibilities,' which is still exercising, to a degree perhaps hardly realized in this country, public opinion in Germany and abroad.

It is inevitable that Mr. Gooch should indicate the conclusions which he reaches; he does so, as all who know his other writings would expect, with a singular freedom from partiality, in a few carefully phrased sentences. He completely exculpates France, and in particular M. Poincaré, from the charges frequently made, not only by German but also by English and American writers:

'If it is impossible to concede his claim, that for many years France had done everything possible to avert the cataclysm, there is no foundation for the widely held belief that the President desired war.'

His general conclusion is: "Though the conduct of each of the belligerents appeared to its enemies to indicate a double dose of original sin, it was nevertheless in every case what might have been expected.'

Egypt and the Old Testament, by T. Eric Peet, Professor of Egyptology in the University of Liverpool. London, 1923. 58.

History of Roman Religion, by W. R. Halliday B.A., B.Litt., Professor of History in the University of Liverpool. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1923. 53.

[Edward Shillito in the Sunday Times]

THESE books are not meant to be 'popular' in the sense in which that word is commonly used. They are written for thoughtful readers who wish to keep in touch with lines of study which are not their own peculiar concern. This end these two books will serve excellently.

Mr. Peet has been fortunate in his hour. Everyone is talking Egypt; and almost the first thing the reader will do in opening the book will be to look for Tutankhamen. He will find him

in his historic place in Chapter VI, but the book has a theme to which it keeps closely, and in that theme the king of whom we are thinking has no great place. Mr. Peet has all the caution of the true scholar-perhaps too much caution, but it is a fault on the right side. He knows of all the wild, and sometimes unscrupulous, use made by certain writers, whose excellent purpose it is to vindicate the Biblical narratives; and he has the scholar's hesitation to go beyond the precise evidence. In archæology there must often be a lack of definiteness. Scholars, for example, accepting the same astronomical methods of deciding dates, differ by 2000 years one from another when they set about fixing a date for one dynasty!

The evidence that bears upon the relations between Egypt and Palestine is given by Mr. Peet carefully. He is not a partisan; his attitude is rather indicated by the phrase, 'Is it so certain?' It is unlikely that the negative critics who deny the historicity of the early records of Israel, or the very positive critics who find them confirmed by scanty inferences from Egyptian remains, will find much grist for their mills. But the calm weighing of evidence will be of great value to both.

The book upon Roman religion is excellent, and for all classical scholars whose memories are rusty it will be of great interest. Roman religion in itself, as Warde Fowler proved, can be a most fascinating subject; it has also a bearing both upon the study of the Latin classics, and, for an even wider audience, upon the religious life of the world into which Christianity came. Mr. Halliday has rendered a valuable service through his scholarly work. We shall look forward to the other works of this series.

Great and Small Things, by Sir Ray Lankester. London: Methuen, 1923. 7s. 6d.

[Sunday Times]

THERE is no living writer with a happier knack of conveying scientific truth or exciting scientific curiosity than that possessed by Sir Ray Lankester, and his last volume is a worthy successor of that fascinating book, Science from an Easy Chair, one of the most valuable, as it was one of the most successful, of the excellent class to which it belongs. Great and Small Things includes papers on a miscellaneous collection of subjects of widely differing interest, all relating to the study of living things, 'ranging from the phagocyte to the gorilla, from the pond-snail to the Russian giant, from facts about longevity to theories as to human progress and the cruelty of

Nature,' and most of which have already appeared in daily and weekly journals. Often touching on issues of the gravest scientific interest, they are written with a clearness of thought and a direct simplicity of style which make their meaning clear to any reader of average intelligence; and no better present could be found for a clever boy or girl with a taste for biological study.

The Year's Work in English Studies, 1920-1, edited for the English Association, by Sir Sidney Lee and F. S. Boas. London and New York: Oxford University Press. 78. 6d.

[New Statesman]

THE English Association is doing excellent work in producing summaries like this, in which specialists deal with the books and papers that have keenly interested them in contrast to the ready and often hasty reports of the press in general. Exact references to periodicals are particularly valuable, as these are not easily kept in the mind or the library of most students. Our only suggestion is that really bad, inefficient, or freakish books should not be mentioned at all, or more frankly treated. More space is desirable for good books and investigations of importance to letters. Sir Sidney Lee's section on Shakespeare is worth special attention; also that on the Nineteenth Century by Professor Herford, which includes a notice at some length of Professor Elton's fine Survey, 1830–80, and Wordsworth's French lady and daughter. More might have been said of the Byron problem raised in Astarte. Elsewhere, new work on such dissimilar heroines as Vanessa and Dorothy Osborne is noted. The zeal shown in disinterring or renovating all sorts of authors is amazing, and vastly fortified by American theses. What is chiefly wanted to-day is a guide to literary taste with frank denunciation of the second-rate.

BOOKS MENTIONED

FRIBOURG, ANDRÉ. Les Semeurs de Haine.
Paris: Chapelet éditeurs, 1923.
LANDWEHR, GENERAL OTTOKAR. Übervölkertes
Land. Vienna: Verlag W. Braumüller, 1923.
ONCKEN, HERMANN. The Historical Rhine Policy
of the French. Stuttgart-Gotha: F. A. Perthese,
A-G., 1922.

PAPINI, GIOVANNI. Life of Christ. Translated by Dorothy Canfield Fisher. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1923. $3.50.

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