64 THE SCOTTISH NATURALIST 



day, and the pursuit of them was practically unrestricted as compared 

 with the limitations imposed at the present time. Since 1846, the year 

 in which the first edition of this book appeared, great advances and 

 changes have naturally been made in zoological knowledge and 

 nomenclature. In order to bring this edition up to date in these 

 respects, Sir Herbert has appended, where necessary, footnotes, 

 wherein are made the desirable corrections, but in no case has the 

 original text been altered. This volume has everything to recommend 

 it, and will prove a most desirable acquisition to all interested, and they 

 are very many, in the subject with which it deals so delightfully and 

 which it presents in such an artistic garb. 



Animal Life and Human Progress. Edited by Arthur Dendy, 

 D.Sc, F.R.S. Pp. vii. + 227. London: Constable and Co., 

 Ltd., 1919. Price los. 6d. net. 



The War and reconstruction have led politicians and populace to 

 demand that science must be justified by its fruits, and that the one 

 test of the fruit must be its utility. Whatever may be thought of so 

 naive an estimation of the end of knowledge, the test has nevertheless 

 to be passed, and with the view of enlightening the people as to the 

 benefits which the study of animal life has showered upon the nations, 

 a course of lectures was arranged at King's College, London. The nine 

 lectures, each by an acknowledged authority and each dealing with 

 a distinct aspect of utilitarian zoology, met with great success, and now 

 appear in this volume for the use of a wider public. 



They give varied glimpses of highways of research, or of obscure 

 bypaths which have led or which mark the way to man's welfare. Now 

 it is that the study of the lower animals, parasites or pests, enables man 

 to checkmate the destroyers of his health or wheat, makes colonisation 

 possible where tsetse-flies, carrying the agents of disease, prevented the 

 survival of domestic stock and formed a serious barrier to settlement, 

 or gives a new control over the results of the breeding of stock ; again 

 it is that a broader view of the course of animal life indicates how 

 intimately man is involved, sometimes for weal, sometimes for ill, in 

 the great procession of nature, or points a way to a revivifying education 

 or to an advance in social and moral relations. These and many other 

 helpful results of zoological research are described in the lectures, which 

 impress one with a sense of the solid contribution this science has made 

 to the progress of mankind. 



In a series of lectures, each strikingly independent of its neighbour, 

 and each by a mind working along a line of its own^ a lack of unified 

 treatment is certain to make one feel that something has fallen between 

 the stools. This is inevitable ; the book must be regarded as a valuable 

 series of glimpses into zoological possibilities rather than as an epitome 

 of zoological accomplishments. There is a tenth subject we should have 

 liked to have seen added to the series on account of its fundamental 

 importance the vital connection between animal study and the success 

 of the farmer's or fruit-grower's crops. J. R. 



