PREFACE.
The author claims no originality for the matter of this book for young readers on Strange Peoples. He has culled material where he could. His aim has been to present a series of sketches which may render the maps in the geography more interesting and give school children a broader and deeper sympathy with other races and peoples. Indebted to many books, he has been under constant obligations to Verneau’s Les Races Humaines and Ratzel’s Völkerkunde. Other books which have been helpful will be found listed at the close of this volume.
At first the author planned to use only original or new illustrations. It has been, however, impossible to carry out this plan. Less than one fourth of the pictures are really new; it is believed, however, that all are authentic and will prove instructive.
It would have been easy to make the book more interesting by the introduction of descriptions, more detailed, of the ridiculous or dreadful practices of some races. The purpose has, however, not been to hold other peoples up to ridicule nor to teach morality by contrast; there are, indeed, too many matters for criticism in our own mode of life to warrant such a treatment. Nor would it be possible in a book for children to present that full discussion which might be expected in a treatise on ethnology for students. The book makes no pretence to systematic treatment; only a few people are taken, here and there, almost at haphazard, to illustrate the marvellous richness of the field for study which, even now, is presented by the Strange Peoples of the globe.