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pulses of the individual? Do rules of law, courts, and judges never protect the individ- ual from capricious attacks on his freedom and the legitimate exercise of his impulses? Is it established that cultures with elaboration of governmental and religious sectors and with complex technologies are inevitably repressed and drab? If the statistics of the book suggest this, perhaps it is because no traits entered the factor analysis that might have modified or contradicted such a conclusion. Conspicuously absent from the traits treated by factor analysis in this study are gambling, other forms of recrea- tion or leisure time activity, drama, dancing, music, plastic and graphic arts, talent mobility, cliques and friendship groups, heresies and unorthodox religious sects, crime, delinquency, suicide, irregular unions, organized vice, personality disorders, alcoholic beverages, narcotics and stimulants, and almost anything else that might indicate an outlet for impulse or the failure of complex organization or high technology to suppress impulse.

Or we might approach the question from the other end and ask whether impulse control is always confined to complex societies. Does it require no impulse control for a hunter wearing a deer or antelope mask to steal slowly and quietly up on game? Did the officers of the Plains Men’s Societies who, because of their vows, stood their ground in battle in the face of grave dangers exercise no impulse control? Does it take no self- discipline to honor restraint relationships in all circumstances? What shall we say of the American Indian youth who braves hunger, pain, dark, and loneliness in order to induce a sacred vision? To depend entirely on formal, declared, and surface criteria, regardless of whether we are dealing with a highly structured culture or a loosely or- ganized one, is much like insisting that there are no social restraints in a small Amer- ican village because it lacks the police force, the jail, and the courthouse of the urban center.

The authors come close to appreciating the degree to which their inputs and omis- sions predetermined the results when they say, “ . . . technology may extract more variance than other factors simply because there were more technology traits included in our data.” But why were more technology traits included in the data? Obviously it was because the trait list was selected by Simmons for a much different purpose. Simmons gives as the chief questions guiding his research, “What in old age are the possible adjustments to different environments, both physical and social. . . what securities for long life may be provided by the various social milieus and what may the aged do as individuals to safeguard their interests?” With these goals in mind it is not surprising that Simmons’ trait list is mainly an inventory of industries, industrial techniques, economic relations, and social units. There is not one item in it that deals with the aesthetic, and very little that touches the conceptual. I t is difficult to conceive of data less likely to illuminate the relationship between technology and the moral order ! This study suggests that social scientists have now achieved an impressive level of statistical sophistication. But it demonstrates that they must think more sensitively and profoundly about their postulates and data if they are to have anything worth while to calculate.

The Economic History o j World Population. CARLO M. CIPOLLA. (Pelican Books A537.) Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books, 1962. 125 pp., bibliography, 9 figures, index, 18 tables. $.95.

Reviewed by ROBERT ANDERSON, University oj Utah

A professor of economic history a t the University of Turin and the University of California a t Berkeley here describes “from a global point of view the development of

Book Reviews 969 mankind in its material endeavour: its growth in numbers and levels of living,” and reflects upon “some of the alarming problems” that arise from this development. The two themes of economic growth and the population explosions are explored in relation to energy theory and Malthusian doctrine.

Cipolla’s thesis is that the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions which followed man’s mastery of animate and inanimate energy resources were qualitative changes that “created deep breaches in the continuity of the historical process” (p. 29). “The three basic types of economic organization-hunting, agricultural, industrial-are accompanied by three corresponding ranges of economic and demographic levels a t which human societies operate” (p. 107). Characterization of the latter two economies is accomplished with verbal and statistical compactness in reference to such traditional economic facets as production, the roles and relative importance of the several produc- tive sectors, income and its distribution, capital, savings and investment, and trans- port and trade. Whether all of these categories are useful if projected backward into the system under which man lived for 99 percent of his existence is a question that need not be dwelt upon, as the author does not attempt it. The treatment of economic growth from the 8th millennium B.C. to the present in relation to the world’s production and consumption of energy is entirely convincing and is another demonstration of the worth of the theory which Leslie A. White (The Evolution of Culture, 1959) elaborated in the total perspective of cultural evolution.

The second theme of this popularly written book, population growth, is as amply documented and its general relation to energy sources and converters is made equally clear. But the outcome is less satisfactory because the principal problem raised is left as a human dilemma. As the author describes it, the world’s population responded to the energy revolutions both in numbers explosions and in the development of distinctive equilibrium patterns. High but stable crude birth rates and high but less stable death rates produce in agricultural societies a growth rate with a n astronomical potential, but size is controlled by the recurrent Malthusian checks of epidemic, famine, and, to a lesser extent, war. In industrial society, high recurrent death peaks disappear with technical mastery of the means of subsistence and of disease. But a decreasing mortality rate and hence increasing population is countered in time by a providential levelling off and decrease in the birth rate. As we are advised so often today, it is coexistence of high birth rate agricultural societies of the underdeveloped areas and the high energy systems of the West that brings about “the population problem.” Diffusion of Western technology and medical science to the peasant masses has all but eliminated famine and epidemic, with the result that mortality has dropped dramatically. But their birth rates remain unchecked and population spirals. “From a demographic point of view, ail that ‘exploding’ underdeveloped countries need is to bring down their birth-rates to a manageable level. But the reduction of birth-rates is in some way related to substan- tial improvement in the levels of living. And these improvements are the more difficult to obtain the greater the population pressure is” (p. 89). Thus the major dilemma.

I t is patent that neither energy theory as used here in the large, nor Malthusian doctrine, explains the crucial phenomenon-fluctuating fertility. I t is easy enough to see that culture eliminates death-dealing starvation and epidemic. But how does it operate to make a people prolific a t one time and virtually barren at another? Is i t enough to pair a biological factor, “a natural propensity to reproduce,” with an am- biguous cultural factor, prosperity, the latter acting only negatively as a check upon that propensity? Culturologists would be more comfortable with a hypothesis that cul- ture is the active agent which produces both kinds of birth rates, high and low, in all

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societies, and a theory that would afford both long and short run predictions of fer- tility trends on the basis of known cultural facts. This is a matter outside the scope of this review. But let me only assert that a demand-for-labor theory as ably developed by Sydney Coontz (Population Theories and the Economic Interpretation, 1957) is wholly consistent with the cultural approach and i t has the additional recommendation of being elegantly simple, obviating entanglement with “a complex interplay of hetero- geneous forces” cited by Cipolla (p. 87).

The statement of preference may be taken as occupational bias and not a telling criticism of The Economic History o j World Population. However, in my opinion, there are two real faults which mar an otherwise highly informative and useful book. Judged by the evidence of comparative ethnography, Cipolla overdraws his picture of pre- neolithic man as a Hobbsian savage, avid for the flesh of hyenas and his own human neighbors, an inveterate infanticide and headhunter, an aggressive beast selected for a predatory life (see pp. 37, 74, 112-114). And the soundly materialistic and global framework within which the author traces man’s mastery of energy and its economic consequences collapses in a programmatic final chapter which is almost wholly value- centered and ethnocentric.

Factors Affecting H u m a n Fertility in Nonindustrial Societies: A Cross-cultural Study. MONI NAG. (Yale University Publications in Anthropology. Number 66.) New Haven: Department of Anthropology, Yale University, 1962. 227 pp., appendices, bibliography, 80 tables. $2.50.

Reviewed by PAUL H. GEBKARD, Indiana University This book could best be described as the result of the attempt of a careful demog-

rapher, using a precise and statistical methodology, to analyze data chiefly gathered and presented by various anthropologists, many of whom were not primarily concerned with human fertility. The fact that Dr. Nag’s attempt was largely successful is a tribute to his abilities and an inspiration for anthropologists to gather not only more, but also more precise, data. That such desired data can be collected is demonstrated by Dr. Nag’s own brief field work among the Havasupai and Walapai.

The sample consists of 61 nonindustrial societies: 20 from Africa, 16 from North and Central America, 13 from Asia, and 12 from the Pacific islands. All generally fit the category of “preliterate” societies except for the Hutterites who were included presumably because they represent the ultimate in human reproduction.

Dr. Nag first treats the factors relating to coitus: abstinence, both voluntary and involuntary; age a t marriage; coital frequency; separation, divorce, and widowing; and polygamy. Having dealt with the mechanism of bringing the sperm and egg to- gether, he then examines the factors relating to conception: age a t menarche, age a t menopause, diet, venereal disease, and contraception. Lastly, he takes up the question of the fate of the embryo: induced abortion, spontaneous abortion (miscarriage), still- birth, and neonatal mortality.

All of this is done with an admirable but somewhat machine-like clarity and rigor. Facts are clearly and succinctly stated. Concepts to which other authors have devoted paragraphs are reduced to their essence and expressed in a sentence or two. Most im- pressive of all is the careful qualification of statements: no easy assumptions, free gen- eralizations, or impressionistic thoughts are allowed. A plain honesty, which is un- fortunately rare in modern sociology and anthropology, deserves commendation.

While a number of dubious hypotheses, some little more than academic folklore, are examined and dismissed, a very few slip past Dr. Nag and then only because they