South America

IN the volume under notice, Mr. A. H. Keane gives a much needed compendium of the geography of South America. Since its independence from Spain and Portugal, that half-continent has been making great commercial strides, until its trade now equals in value that of British India. The importance of its varied products, its peculiar ethnological history, its wonderful physical features, its modern political advancement, make it a region of constantly increasing interest to the merchant, the man of science, the student and the statesman; while the fact that only about five-sevenths of it have thus far been explored and partially mapped makes it a favourite field for the geographer. Mr. Keane appears to have understood exactly what the world in general required from his able pen, and instead of confining himself to geography pure and simple, as the title of his work indicates, he has taken his subject in its most comprehensive sense. He gives us, in three preliminary chapters, the physical features of the country, its orography, great plains. plateaux, fluvial systems, seaboard, fjords, outlying islands, climate, flora and fauna and a valuable dissertation upon the ethical and later ethnical and historical relations of its much scattered tribes. He holds it to be “beyond reasonable doubt that man had spread in early Pleistocene times from his eastern cradle to the New World, probably by two routes—from Europe by the still persisting land connection with Greenland and Labrador, and, from Asia, by the narrow Bering Strait.” He bases this assertion upon the fossil remains of man which are found in North and South America, “representing the two primordial types, which may be called the long-headed Afro-European and the round-headed Asiatic. These, strange to say, are found in far greater abundance in the southern than in the northern division.” … “The inference seems inevitable that South America was already in Pleistocene times peopled to its utmost limits by two primitive races that still persist in the same region”—a statement which admits of doubt. “The long-heads are believed to have been the first arrivals … and later the round-heads,” the latter “generally keeping to the Pacific side.” The former are supposed to have afterwards migrated from their early settlements in southern Brazil and Argentina over a greater part of eastern South America.