Gillen, subprotector of Aborigines at Alice Springs, South Australia. Mr Gillen has known the rather isolated savages of Central Australia for twenty years, and possesses their confidence, having been permitted, with Mr Spencer, to observe their initiatory and magical rites. These gentlemen have borne the heat of many a day and the fatigue of many a sleepless night in watching mummeries often cruel and disgusting. They have furnished an account of the whole aboriginal life, which may almost be called exhaustive, and give us many photographs. With scarcely a trace of theory, they give facts of every description. We cannot here go into these; but it is to be observed that the tribes, especially the Arunta, are all but destitute (as here described) of any trace of what the widest definition could call religion. On the other hand, they possess an elaborate material magic, a magic of sympathy' and imitation, with no appeal to spirits. They have adopted a theory of evolution which leaves no room for a creative power, or for any future life except that of re-incarnation. Their form of Totemism is peculiar, perhaps unique. On the other hand, the development of government is, in some respects, more advanced than that of most of the ' aborigines'-a kind of magistracy descending in the male line, not the female. To read this book is an education to the scientific explorer. A volume much slighter, though interesting and intelligent, is Mr Richard Semon's' In the Australian Bush,' translated from the German. Mr Semon was travelling for about two years in the northern parts of Australia. He found the natives 'truthful on the whole'; apparently they could not take the trouble to invent a good lie. In the language, 'abstract words' are wanting, though in Central Australia Mr Spencer notes the names of two mythical beings, Ungambikula, which means, self-existing, or made out of nothing.' It is not easy to be more abstract' than that. Mr Semon's book, though very interesting as a record of travel, has no particular anthropological value. Mr Alldridge's book, 'The Sherbro and its Hinterland,' is of a practical character, and adds very little to our knowledge of the more intimate ideas of the natives of Western Africa. It would be very instructive if we knew the esoteric secrets of the Mysteries. But Mr Alldridge says, 'I have never yet succeeded in penetrating the inner Mysteries, and indeed I always tell the people that I have no wish that they should divulge to me anything that they have sworn to keep secret.' As moralists we must commend Mr Alldridge, but the anthropologist grieves. A few traces of 'automatism'-as in the European use of the divining-rod-occur in native divination. Of these, however, Mr Skeat gives much better examples. His 'Malay Magic' is a particularly excellent work. The author states the usual objections against all anthropological evidence, objections which we have already considered. He then gives the chants and other native songs, on which he founds his reports, in the original language, with translations. This, as we have seen, is the best of all kinds of testimony in the anthropological field. The Malays, under a veneer of Islam, preserve almost all the widely diffused ideas of savage culture. They are too deeply Islamised to teach us much about their earlier religion, but they are masters of magic and spells. In divination, forms of automatism (as in table-turning') are employed; and the movements, caused by unconscious muscular action, are attributed to spirits. The anecdote quoted from Sir Francis Swettenham, of a piece of divination done under his own eyes, may, perhaps, be explained by Mr Maskelyne, the conjurer, but is certainly, as regards its method, beyond the ordinary comprehension. Though many of the Malay beliefs and practices, of which Mr Skeat tells us, are familiar to us already as existing among other races, the exactitude of his method and his sympathetic attitude make his volume one of the best of recent contributions to anthropology. In conclusion, our readers will be glad to hear that Mr Spencer and Mr Gillen, by the aid of the Colonial Governments, and of friends, are engaged in a new and promising expedition. The Government of India has appointed Mr Risley (well known for his excellent researches) to be Director of Ethnography. The Journal of the Anthropological Institute' has been greatly enlarged and improved, thanks to the energy of Mr Arthur Evans and the late and actual presidents, Mr C. H. Read and Mr Haddon, whose record of research near Torres Straits is in the press. The harvest is vast, and the reapers are neither few nor indolent. Art. X.-THE PROGRESS OF WOMEN. 1. The International Congress of Women, 1899: Report of Transactions. Seven vols. Edited by the Countess of Aberdeen. London: Fisher Unwin, 1900. 2. Women and their Work. By the Hon. Mrs Arthur Lyttelton. London: Methuen, 1901. It is probably true to say that while a constant and unfailing interest attaches to the doings of men, and to the relations between men and women, a discussion on the position of women only is one which often meets with but very half-hearted welcome. It is connected in people's minds with a certain combativeness and assertiveness, of which man, who wishes to be let alone, is naturally intolerant. He is apt to turn away in dismay from statements such as that recently made by a wellknown novelist, that there is 'great need for an earnest, unbiassed enquiry into the reason why woman all over the world has become such a disturbing element in the life-history of man,' and for an equally earnest endeavour to find some sure foothold for improvement.' That, he says, is exactly what is not required; enquiries and endeavours are in their results profoundly unpleasing; and although, no doubt, women are a disturbing element in the life-history of men, it is an element to which men have now become accustomed. Women, of course, may affect one side of men's lives; but, when that side is outlived or put aside, women can disturb no longer, and can be comfortably relegated to their proper place as mistresses of households, mothers of children, and ministering angels, when ministering angels are required. Yet this is not, and it never really has been the fact. There is more truth in the saying, 'Cherchez la femme,' than there is in most of such maxims; and neither the present attempt to regulate the position of women, nor the enquiry which Mrs Steele suggests, will materially increase the disturbing element of which she speaks. From the beginnings of history until now it has existed, and it has refused to give way either to oppression or to idealisation. Women have indeed experienced all possible vicissitudes of fortune; the highest and the lowest fate has been theirs. If it be true to say that women at their worst and best are as heaven and hell, it is truer still to say that the extremes of women's fate have touched heaven and hell. Women have been drudges and beasts of burden; they have been shut up and sequestered; their mental and spiritual qualities have been dwarfed and stunted; they have exercised, by means lawful and unlawful, supreme empire over men; they have been idealised and exalted to the skies, they have been subjected to the deepest and worst degradation the world can ever know; they have been praised and abused; the highest tributes and the most scathing satires have been lavished upon them; and through it all they have been, and they remain, a disturbing element in the lives of men. The methods of the disturbance are indeed various. Sometimes a woman harasses men by irrationality and caprice; sometimes she wrecks men and things by illregulated love; sometimes, like Madame Guyon, she interferes with the established view of religion; sometimes, as Keats puts it, . . . She is like a milk-white lamb that bleats sometimes, as the persistent earnest reformer, she upsets the even tenour of man's way; but always she is liable to appear as a disturbing force which it is difficult to reckon with, and which is full of unexpected surprises. It is interesting, however, to notice that, throughout all their vicissitudes, and throughout all their history, women have never for any length of time been treated as if they were bound by the same laws, amenable to the same reasoning, and possessed of the same mental powers as men; and there are those who assert that herein lies the secret of the difficulty and the disturbance. Of course there is the obvious reply that this is because women are physically and intellectually inferior, although possibly morally superior, to men, and that in this world, so long as the physical and intellectual forces hold, as they do, the supreme place, so long women must take the lower position. This argument entirely justifies woman's place in history, for it asserts that women are both inferior and superior to men, but never their equals. They are weaker, they are stupider, and they are better than men ; and they always will remain so. That is the view held by many at the present day, and it is the view which has hitherto prevailed in the history of mankind. But this again is met by the assertion that, as civilisation advances, physical force tends to yield to intellectual force; and that, while physically weaker, women only need education and opportunity to be intellectually the equals of men; while, when the moral standard rises, as it undoubtedly is rising and ought to rise, the moral difference between men and women will diminish and finally tend to disappear. According to this view, which is developed by Mrs Lyttelton in the introductory chapter of her book, women are now in a transition stage, and are growing up from a state of tutelage and protection to one of freedom and responsibility. They will gradually rise to the intellectual standard of men, and men will rise to the moral standard of women; and, when this is accomplished, the difference in the physical strength of men and women will be immaterial. It cannot be denied that this is a prospect which would seem to promise well for the race. The question is, first, whether events seem to be proving its truth; and secondly, whether the intellectual equalisation of men and women will not lead to grave difficulties and to the disruption of society as at present constituted. Now there can be no doubt that the nineteenth century has had an immense influence on the position of women. Its opening years probably saw women in as unprogressive a state as at any period of civilised times. It is unnecessary to do more than recapitulate the well-known facts that they were badly educated, that the professions were closed to them, and that they suffered under considerable disabilities as to property, while games, athletic exercises, and even good health, were considered unwomanly. A writer early in the last century lamented that the social policy of all climates and ages should have agreed to restrict the amiable sex to the power of pleasing, and should have thus put it out of their power to display the qualities of sagacity, prudence, loyalty, grandeur of spirit and active heroism, which distinguished the lady whose biography he was writing, and which he seemed to think existed undiscovered and unknown in a large number of her fellows. On the other hand, those members of the amiable sex' who succeeded in pleasing were treated with great |