tax and that it has been impossible to create a new income tax since the revolution, the force of this statement becomes apparent. We are thus prepared for the final recommendation of the committee, which is nothing more nor less than the introduction of the listing system as the best solution of the Massachusetts tax problems. This is a sorry outcome of the long inquiry.

On the other hand, however, there are some interesting points in the report. It shows how impracticable the single tax theory is. According to the testimony of the single-taxers themselves, it would be impossible to raise sufficient revenue in the farming counties, and they recommend that the poor towns receive aid from the more prosperous. The committee pertinently asks: Where is this aid

to come from?

Again the committee strenuously advocates the introduction of a graduated inheritance tax, and quotes quite liberally from Dr. West's recent monograph on the subject. They also object to the exemption of municipal bonds from taxation, on which topic there is much to be said on both sides. Finally they call attention to some of the results of the exemption of mortgage notes, and show that the advantages to the mortgagor have been grossly exaggerated.

The report, therefore, is a mixture of good and bad. It does not propose any comprehensive reform and it does not grapple with the subject in all its bearings. It is on the whole a distinct disappointment, and students will derive more profit from the testimony than from the report itself. It is encouraging to learn, however, that there is little prospect of the adoption of the committee's retrograde recommendations, while the better propositions, like those for an inheritance tax, are attracting considerable attention and support. Massachusetts has much to learn before putting herself on a par with Pennsylvania.

Anthropo-Geographie.

EDWIN R. A. SELIGMAN.

Von FRIEDRICH RATZEL. Vol. II. Stuttgart, Buchdruckerei von E. Engelhorn, 1891.750 pp. This work is part of the Bibliothek Geographischer Handbücher, and the first volume was issued in 1882. A good opportunity is offered, therefore, for noting the fruit of the ten years' study which has intervened. There is no need of course to recommend the book to students of the subject; the author's name is a sufficient guarantee of its scholarly character. Yet it cannot be said that its true import

ance is measured by its actual contributions to science. The proper significance of the book lies in the avowed aims of its author, rather than in the conclusions attained. The main purpose of the work is to bring the social sciences into proper relations with geography. Particularly is this important at present, when the trend of sociological thought seems to be toward a keener appreciation of the economic and material bases of social life; or in other words, toward the interpretation of social phenomena in terms of biologic and natural law. Society in this later view is not merely the result of conscious human effort, which has the power once for all to set aside the limitations of environment as soon as social life begins. It is to a considerable extent the product of forces greater than those of human will, which act continually through such environment.

Experience has fully justified the author's enthusiastic plea in his earlier volume for a closer study of geography in its bearing on social science. The most notable recent example of the tenability of his position is offered by the brilliant contribution of Professor James Bryce in the Contemporary Review for July, 1892.

Geography [says Mr. Bryce] is the point of contact between the sciences of nature taken all together and the branches of inquiry which deal with man and his institutions. Geography gathers up the results which the geologist, the botanist [and] the zoologist have obtained, and presents them to the student of history, of economics, of politics, as an important. part of the data from which he must start and of the materials to which he will have to refer at many points in the progress of his researches.

There is perhaps a tendency on the part of Professor Ratzel to exaggerate the importance of his subject, but that is a failing common to all earnest students. The only criticism which ought to be made upon the work as a whole is that the mode of treatment is too strictly geographical. Professor Ratzel is a geographer par excellence, and all other branches of knowledge are made to pay tribute to his favorite science. In a work of this description, however, which seeks to lay the foundations of a science of "anthropogeography," two distinct modes of treatment are possible. On the one hand the work may be descriptive, statistical and encyclopædic, like Patton's admirable Resources of the United States. Such a treatment presents the bare platform on which social characters are set at work; but it never suggests new combinations in the setting. On the other hand there may be given a broad-line sketch of the earth, together with some description of the parts which the social

forces are to take. Such a treatment, drawing at once upon biology, botany and geology, becomes correspondingly more suggestive. An example of this method we find, though rather popularly than scientifically employed, in Professor Shaler's Nature and Man in North America.

Professor Ratzel seems to have taken an intermediate course, containing elements of each method, but embodying neither in purest essence. He employs the statistical and descriptive method only in the chapters upon population, which are really discussions of methods as much as of results, and are in most cases very readable. But he seems to have left untouched many phases of the subject, which, if interpreted in terms of the theory of evolution, would have vastly broadened the field of view. For example, the subject of acclimatization, which to many constitutes a most important branch of social theory, is rather neglected, despite the fact that the whole theory of race dispersions depends to some extent upon our judgment with regard to it. Again, the study of plant and animal geography is one of the main supports of the theory of evolution in the hands of a master like Alfred Russell Wallace. A knowledge of the conclusions of Wallace and Gray is of profound import for one who would correctly interpret and criticise any theory with regard to the dispersion or filiation of the great races of men. Westermarck finds laws of the animal group a cogent argument in support of his theory of the human family. Ought we not to apply the same reasoning to the cognate problems of the migrations of the human race? The whole drift of modern opinion, from Wright to Romanes, is in favor of such a mode of study. And yet Professor Ratzel, devoting many pages to the effects of forests upon social life, is content to pass by the causes which produced this distribution of vegetable life as it to-day exists. He studies forests, and all else in fact, statically and not dynamically, to use a much abused expression; and thereby he stops short of the work which might truly be expected of the anthropo-geographer. If, as certain expressions tend to show, he accepts the theory of autochthonous man, there is obviously no suggestiveness in a comparison of plant, animal and human migrations. But no student can deny the evidence of such migrations, at all events in the sub-human kingdoms. Does not the true scientific attitude of mind demand that, while still reserving decision with regard to man, we shall recognize the possibility of obtaining results by comparison with the movements of lower forms of life?

One of the most successful portions of the work is that which deals with statistical method, the graphical representation of populations, and the classification of races; and this second volume offers a convenient résumé of these subjects. But it is a book for the expert statistician and geographer, contrasting in some respects with the work of Professor Oscar Peschel. Some results obtained by the latter might be used with profit to supplement portions of Professor Ratzel's work. For example, the effect of coast lines upon the development of the art of navigation would materially broaden the scope of the chapter upon coasts and rivers. There are admirable chapters upon the effect of climate, mountains, rivers and seas upon social evolution, although we should hesitate to credit too close a connection between the ruling rate of wages and climatic conditions. It savors of the conclusions in the History of Civilization in England. The chapter upon the growth, localization and constitution of cities, forms one of the best parts of the second volume.

It should finally be noted that for the sociologist these volumes contain an immense mass of material which has never before been put together. They should serve as the groundwork on the one hand for a broader social science, and on the other for a keener appreciation by geographers of the true place of their science in its relations to man. WILLIAM Z. RIPLEY.

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE

OF TECHNOLOGY.

La Population, les Causes de ses Progrès et les Obstacles qui en Arrêtent l'Essor. Par ÉDOUARD VAN DER SMISSEN. Paris, Guillaumin, and Bruxelles, Société Belge de Librairie, 1893. — 8vo, 564 pp.

Histoire de la Population Française. Par Lucien Schöne. Paris, Arthur Rousseau, 1893.

The somewhat startling returns of birth rates in France disclosed by the census of 1890 led the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences to choose "Population" as the subject of competition for the Rossi prize in 1891. Two of the works presented appeared so nearly equal in merit that both were crowned, and both have since been published under the titles above.

M. Van der Smissen's bulky volume is composed of an introduction and three parts, entitled respectively "An Historical Sketch of the Movement of Population," "The Laws of Malthus" and "The Population Question in the Nineteenth Century."

In his "Introduction" the author points out the importance of the general subject and the attention it excites among scholars and statesmen. Exaggerated views find expression in the writings. of two types of alarmists, those who fear over-population and those who expect depopulation. M. Van der Smissen is by no means a Malthusian, but he vicariously assumes the defense of Malthus from his friends, showing that he never supposed that the tendency to over-population would not cease. The error of Malthus consisted in not recognizing, as did Bastiat, the essential harmony of natural with economic laws, and in failing to understand that the increase of population, in its development of economic activities, solves the problem of subsistence. Historically speaking, human fertility has not been responsible for famines or for the foundation of colonies in ancient, mediæval or modern times. Imperfect transportation facilities, on the one hand, and political or commercial motives, on the other, furnish the explanation. Neither should the tremendous increase of population during the present century inspire disquietude. Never has the lot of the humblest been so favorable as now; nor is the subsistence question likely to present difficulties while the United States has but two and one-half inhabitants per square mile, South America, one and one-quarter, Australia, an inhabitant to every one and nine-tenths square miles, and Africa is left out of the account. Commercial intercourse has not yet been developed to the farthest point, nor has final utility in connection with drainage, fertilizing and irrigation been reached.

In dealing with the exponents of the depopulation theory, the author is particularly severe. He calls them a disgrace to demographic science, and exhorts them earnestly in many pages to give up their doctrinal heresies.

The historical sketch begins with the family institution in antiquity, and closes with the eighteenth century. Only salient facts are treated, and the moral seems to be the utter futility of legislation to accomplish directly an acceleration in the movement of population. It was as impotent in the reign of the early Roman emperors, as in the days when the soft-hearted Prussian monarch reduced by royal decree the period of mourning for widowers to three and of widows to nine months, and England's precocious minister offered his celebrated premium on large families, which Herbert Spencer avers to have been the prime factor in quadrupling the poor-tax during the succeeding half-century. In the movements of population economic motives are fundamental, though