Meteorology and Ethics. 



In days whose distance from those of our enlightenment is not great 

 when measured chronologically, though vast when estimated in terms 

 of mental modification, the organism's dependence on its surroundings 

 was unrecognised, and man was master of his fate. But we have 

 changed all that, — the organism is now a whirlpool in the sea of life, 

 and, " man is being recognised more and more as a creature of his en- 

 vironment, a sequence of personalities, each one of which varies from 

 all the others as the conditions of that environment vary." Instead of 

 coelum non animum we read coelum ct animum, and the days of the 

 study of the personality in vacuo have passed away for ever. And so 

 we react from a false abstraction to hardly less obvious exaggeration. 

 Flowers shaped insects' mouth-parts and insects formed the curves of 

 flowers, the popular Lamarckian says, in the exuberance of his confi- 

 dence in modifications and their heritability ; and as for our vices, it is 

 the fault of the weather. The environment, in short, has to serve its 

 turn as the scape -goat of the human camp. But just as there was 

 truth in the old doctrine of the organism's independence and man's 

 mastery of circumstances, so there is truth in the modern reaction ; and 

 we have read with great pleasure, which we wish others to share, 

 Professor E. G. Dexter's clever and careful essay on " Conduct and the 

 Weather : an inductive Study of the Mental Effects of definite Meteoro- 

 logical Conditions" {Psychological Review, Monograph No. 10, vol. ii. 

 1899, pp. 103, 14 figs.). "We hope no one will be unkind enough to 

 recall the line " For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring " — 

 it may be cool enough before this note is published — for the thesis 

 which we would report on is no jeu d' esprit, but a sober induction. 



The meteorologists are probably too busy with the affairs of their 

 own young science, to care as yet much for the inspiration which comes 

 from a contact with other disciplines ; yet if there is one thing that 

 the history of science teaches clearly, it is the value of interactions 

 between the various departments of scientific inquiry. That meteor- 

 ology touches biology at every corner is well known, for whether we 

 study Palolo or the Plankton, migration or the mammoth, whether we 

 take up Bonnier's recent studies on alpinisation or Clement Keid's 

 newly published essay on the origin of the English flora, we have to 

 4 — nat. sc. — vol. xv. no. 89. 49 



