Books: The Swarmings of Peoples

IT BEGAN IN BABEL (444 pp.)—Herbert Wendt—Houghton Mifflin ($6.50).

Man has never been so busy studying himself—on the couch and in the laboratory, in ancient ruins and suburban rumpus rooms. Sociologists make bestsellers out of the abuses of the present, archaeologists fashion books-of-the-month out of the uses of the past, and German Writer Herbert Wendt, who has popularized natural science and prehistory in three previous books, now turns his hand to ethnology.

The study of people—their origins and swarmings, contacts and convolutions—is a wide net for strange fact and curious legend, educated guess and...