Book Reviews 341

domestication of the horse did not start in the Middle East (Pulgram p. 93). The ass
and the onager of the ancient Orient have different phyletic histories from the horse.
We know from H. H. Coghlan’s archeological notes upon the earliest smelted iron
(Notes on Prehistoric and Early Iron i n the Old World, Oxford, 1956,p. 61 seq.) that
the iron dagger from Egypt (Pulgram p. 96-97) was not the oldest known piece of
iron. Rare objects of iron have been found in the third millennium B.C.
H. L. Lorimer (Homer and the Monuments, London, 1950,p. 111-112) has published
a list of iron objects of Mycenean date in Greece and Crete. All these findings were
used a few centuries before lo00 B.C. Pulgram’s date for the first use of iron in Greece
(p. 97) should be revised accordingly. But the first establishment of iron working on a
large scale can be dated in Greece to a period around 900 B.C. Finally, the Iron Age
culture a t Hallstatt in Upper Austria had not flourished by 900 B.C. It was not until
the middle of the seventh century that iron working became established in the Alpine
area.
It should be noted, however, that these details are not concerned with the main
problems of the book. Taken as a whole, this is the most complete linguistic survey of
the cultural history of Italy that has been produced yet. It can be considered a valuable
contribution to the study of man in Italy.

Dictionary of Modern Yoruba. R.C. ABRAHAM.Warwick Square: University of London

Press, 1958. xli, 776 pp., addenda, 92 illustrations. 5O/-net.
Reviewed by DAVID
OLYSTED,University of California, Davis
Abraham’s dictionary contains an explanation of orthography, a bibliography, a
grammatical sketch (of some 40 pages), the main body of the dictionary (691 pages),
another 18 pages of words gathered too late to be alphabetized with the main glossary,
a list of illustrations, and finally about 60 pages of line-drawn illustrations of plants,
animals and artifacts. The whole is reproduced by photo-offset from the typescript of
the author, who had the staggering job of typing more than 800 pages, most of it in
two columns. One result is that, with very few devices available to indicate entries,
subheads, sub-subheads, and so on, it is quite difficult to tell the difference between
such levels in the body of the work. While the author has striven mightily within the
limits of resources available to him, it must be said that the University of London
Press has not given the work the physical embodiment it deserves.
Although it is not the last word on the subject, the grammatical sketch is a very
welcome addition to the literature on the language. It succeeds in being so despite
terminological peculiarities which reveal linguistic confusion (w “represents ‘nw’ [vela-
rised In’]”; what is referred to here is clearly labialized [n] or [v]. “The sound wa
exists beside wa”; here, and ubiquitously, Abraham uses “sound” for “sequence”) or
a t least idiosyncrasy (“diminished breathing” appears to mean geminated vowel).
Abraham presents convincing evidence of the phonemic status of ten tones (four
“static,” three rising and three falling). He shows, in the best-documented presenta-
tion so far, that the rising and falling tones cannot be analyzed as combinations of the
various levels. Perhaps his work will help enlighten those who have doubted the com-
plexity of Yoruba pitch phenomena (the reviewer, after publishing [Word 19511 an
analysis including nine Yoruba phonemes of pitch, was advised that this must be
erroneous-by an “expert” who had listened to the language for a total of 45 min-
utes-because “the West African pattern involves three or at most four pitch pho-
nemes”).
342 American A nthropoEogis1 [61, 19591
The main contribution of the work is in the lexical section, where Abraham includes
relatively full ethnographic descriptions in addition to the illustrations. Above all,
this is the first dictionary of an African language in which tones are written throughout,
making it a very valuable addition to the literature on the Niger-Congo languages. It
is to be hoped that the University of London Press will make better arrangements for
Abraham’s forthcoming English-Yoruba Dictionary; the author’s work is deserving of
the support for which he cries out in the Preface.

The YuroR Language: Crammr, Terts, Lexicon. R. H. ROBINS.(University of Cali-

fornia Publications in Linguistics, Vol. XV.) Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1958. xiv, 300 pp., 2 tables. $6.00 (paper bound).
Reviewed by GEORGEL. TRAGER,University of Bujato
The University of California continues to serve linguistic science by publishing data
on the Indian languages still spoken in California. Robins’ grammar of Yurok is
more extensive than anything previously published on the language and gives us what
is probably the last possible recording of such a representative sampling of it.
The Phonology covers pp. 1-10, the Grammar pp. 11-152, the Texts pp. 155-83,
the Lexicon pp. 187-300. The material is thus ample, and will serve in varying degrees
the needs of the comparativist, the typologist, the language-in-culture specialist, and
others. Phonetic detail is minimal in the Phonology, and the phonemic statement,
though a bit startling in appearance (one of the vowels is /k/-described as having
slight retroflexion, but since Robins speaks Southern British English, one wonders
exactly what this might mean), is even less informative and hardly more rigidly check-
able than the traditional ones of 50 years ago. The Grammar sets forth the morphemic
structure by means of paradigms; but just what the morphemes a r e - a s distinct from
morpheme-complexes-would be hard to say without a complete reanalysis. The texts
are of the usual mythological or ritual type, and the lexicon will be useful in compara-
tive studies (Robins is needlessly cautious in his remark about the postulated relation
of Yurok and Wiyot to Algonkian).
The book is valuable, but it would be nice to have a structurally thorough grammar,
with everyday language in the texts, as a last monument to this almost dead language.
Cultural lag in anthropological linguistics-to the extent exhibited here-is deplorable.
PHYSICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Natural SeZection in Man. J. N. SPUHLER (Ed.) Detroit: Wayne State University
Press, 1958. 76 pp. $3.50. (Also published as Memoir No. 86 of the American An-
thropological Association.)
Principles of Genetics. (Fifth Edition.) EDYUNDW. SINNOTT,L. C. DUNN,and THEO-
DOSIUS DOBZHANSKY. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., 1958. xiv,
459 pp., appendix, figures, tables. $6.75.
Reviewed by N. C. TAPPEN,
Emory University
The steady penetration of genetic concepts into modern physical anthropology is
increasingly paralleled by the interest of behaviorally oriented anthropologists in
genetics, as biological and cultural factors are brought into better balance in current
theory. The two books under review are useful a t different levels, the first in under-
standing some of the research problems in human population genetics, the second in
iearning genetic fundamentals.