Getting Better

MAN RISES TO PARNASSUS--Henry Fairfield Osborn--Princeton University Press ($2.50). Ages and ages ago, but eons after primates became distinctly monkeys, apes and men, mankind began his fumbling rise to earthly supremacy. The start was probably on the plateaus of Central Asia and the first men were certainly runners. They hunted to live. Descendants of theirs who wandered into other plateaus of the continents continued the hunting life. Others traveled into forests and became climbers, others into level lowlands and became squatting farmers; others into seashores and became aquatic. Millennia spent in the same sort of places developed distinct types of men. But of whatever type they were, and wherever they lived, they improved their lots. The more difficult it was to gain a livelihood, the quicker and the farther they rose in mentality and spirit. And the purer a race kept itself, the quicker and higher it rose among its neighbors. Today, writes the shrewdly erudite president of the American Museum of Natural History, "purity of race is found in but one nation--the Scandinavian." But, he laments, "so many of its best men have left the homeland for America that today the dependent class is relatively large; realizing these conditions, the Scandinavian people have set on foot a movement to keep the best men and women at home, and such a movement has also been begun in the United States. Such new racial consciousness is a hopeful sign, and with it before our eyes we need not despair." By such conclusion, Dr. Osborn puts a controversial colophon to his otherwise straightforward exposition of man's rise to Parnassus. Men are sure to debate his point acrimoniously.