ATHAM. 2 vols. London. 1859.

2. _Anthropologie der Naturvoelker._ Von Dr. T. WAIZ. 2 Baender. Leipzig.
1860.

Some writers have the remarkable faculty of making the subject which
they may happen to treat forever more distasteful and wearisome to their
readers. Whether the cause be in the style, or the point of view, or
the method of treatment, or in all together, they seem able to force the
student away in disgust from the whole field on which they labor, with
vows never again to cross it.

Such an author, it seems to us, is pre-eminently R.G. Latham, in his
treatment of Ethnology. Happy the man who has any such philosophic
interest in Human Races, that he can ever care to hear again of the
subject, after perusing Mr. Latham's various volumes on "Descriptive
Ethnology." We wonder that the whole English reading public; has not
consigned the science to the shelf of Encyclopedias of Useful Knowledge,
or of Year-Books of Fact, or any other equally philosophic and connected
works, after the treatment which this modern master of Ethnology has
given to the subject.

Such disconnected masses of facts are heaped together in these works,
such incredible dulness is shown in presenting them, such careful
avoidance of any generalization or of any interesting particular, such
a bald and conceited style, and such a cockneyish and self-opinionated
view of human history, as our soul wearies even to think of. Mr. Latham
disdains any link of philosophy, or any classification, among his "ten
thousand facts," as being a fault of the "German School" (whatever that
may be) of Ethnology. It seems to him soundly "British" to disbelieve
all the best conclusions of modern scholarship, and to urge his own
fanciful or shallow theories. He treats all human superstitions and
mythologies as if he were standing in the Strand and judging them by the
ideas of modern London. His is a Cockney's view of antiquity. He cannot
imagine that a barbarous and infant people, groping in the mysteries of
the moral universe, might entertain some earnest and poetic views which
were not precisely in the line of thought of the Londoners of the
nineteenth century, and yet which might be worth investigating. To his
mind, there is no grand march of humanity, slow, but certain, towards
higher ideals, through the various lines of race,--but rather
innumerable ripples on the surface of history, which come and pass away
without connection and without purpose.

The reader