Race, Language and Culture

IN this volume Prof. Franz Boas, the doyen of anthropologists of the United States, has reprinted a selection of his briefer but not, therefore, less weighty contributions to anthropology in the course of his long career. The earliest is dated 1887, and deals characteristically with the methods and subject-matter of geography, more especially in its humanistic aspect. The essays are classified, as the title indicates, under three heads; and the order is logical rather than chronological. This order is the more appropriate in that while naturally as knowledge and experience have grown they have brought with them clearer insight into the processes and possibilities of the science, yet from the very beginning Prof. Boas has been singularly consistent in his methods of approach to certain aspects of the study of man.Race, Language and CultureBy Franz Boas. Pp. xx + 647. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1940.) 21s. net.