The present is the third work in which Dr. Paul Topinard, the well-known pupil and successor of M. Broca, the founder of French Anthropology, has given to the public his general ideas in relation to the science of which he has made so profound a study. In 1876 he published his _Anthropologie_, which reflected in great measure the teaching of his master, Broca. Ten years later, in 1886, appeared his larger and more important work, _Eléments d’anthropologie générale_, which treated of the history and methods of anthropology, with various other subjects. Now Dr. Topinard gives us his matured ideas on “Man in Nature,” by which is meant physical nature, the object of the present work being to show the place that man occupies physically among animals, and his probable origin or descent. It is not surprising that a writer who was the pupil of Professor de Quatrefages as well as of Professor Broca should declare himself a supporter of the principle of unity of composition, formulated by M. Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, from which flows that of evolution, that is the natural derivation of beings from one another. As to the means by which this is brought about, the author reserves his opinion until the publication of a further work which he has in preparation. Dr. Topinard devotes the second chapter of the present work to a consideration of the position to be accorded to anthropology in relation to the other sciences. He declares it to be a pure, concrete science, essentially anatomical and observatory, and thus distinguishes it from ethnography, which has to do with peoples under all their aspects. Both alike are branches of the science of man in its broadest sense. If anything can be added to the author’s explanation, it is that anthropology has to do with mankind as a series of _individuals_, while ethnography is concerned with the _groups_ into which such individuals are collected. This is not inconsistent with Dr. Topinard’s definition of anthropology as the science “which studies human races, the human species, and the place of man in the classification of animals.” For all the facts on which it is based are derived from the observation of individuals, and when races are compared with each other, they are compared as ideal individuals, formed by a generalisation of certain prevailing qualities, just as mankind by a similar process becomes an ideal individual, a scientific Adam, who is compared with other animals. There is an apparent difficulty in relation to psychology which Dr. Topinard claims entirely for anthropology, but it disappears when we see how closely he associates psychology with physiology. He says, and we quite agree with him, that “characters of a psychological nature, reduced to their most simple expression, whether attributed to human races, or to the general human type, belong to ordinary physiological characters; the corresponding anatomical part takes its place by the side