In South Carolina they see but one side of the shield,—­which is quite different, as we know, from the custom of the rest of mankind.

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

1. Descriptive Ethnology. By R.G.  LATHAM. 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 wades slowly through his books, and leaves them with a feeling of intense disgust.  Such a vast gathering of facts merely to produce this melancholy confusion of details!  You feel that his eminence in the science must be from the circumstance that no one else is dull enough and patient enough to gather such a museum of facts in regard to human beings.  The mind is utterly confused as to divisions of human races, and is ready to conclude that there must be almost as many varieties of man as there are tribes or dialects, and that Ethnology has not yet reached the position of a science.