REVIEWS 519 



of the book has a direct appeal. He will see, from Parts I. and IV., why it is 

 necessary for him to take a broad view in relation to official agricultural effort ; 

 not to be obsessed by the recognition of the more immediate needs of the industry 

 in which he is engaged, but to see that the amelioration of agricultural conditions 

 in a country is a matter of well-directed general policy rather than of temporary 

 and particularised alleviation of hardships. Part II. cannot fail to be interesting 

 to him, and to widen his view as to the diversity of planting interests in the tropics. 

 Finally, from Part III. he will see that his interests and those of the peasant are 

 not antagonistic, and this is the more so in proportion as he is willing to help 

 to improve the latter's position, both in regard to the agricultural methods which 

 he will employ and to his ability, by means of the right kind of education, to see 

 where his best interests lie. 



Francis Watts. 



The Making of Species. By Douglas Dewar and Frank Finn. 

 [Pp. xix + 400.] (London : John Lane, 1909. Price 7s. 6d. net.) 



This is another book on Darwinism. A book of this kind to be really valuable 

 must contain either a great many new observations of actual facts, or must be 

 the result of the activity of a far-seeing mind. We cannot bring ourselves to 

 think that there was an urgent need for the book before us. Many of the 

 observations made by the authors have already appeared in two other works : 

 Ornithological and Other Oddities by Frank Finn, and Birds of the Plains and 

 Bombay Ducks by Douglas Dewar. Our sympathy with the observation of living 

 animals is so great, that we cannot but regret that such competent observers as 

 Mr. Dewar and Mr. Finn thought of writing a book about evolution. Many of 

 their general opinions are of great value : such, for instance, as their insistence 

 on the importance of not confounding inference with fact. We cannot think that 

 the qualities possessed by the authors, admirable and indispensable ones in their 

 own sphere, justify them in launching another book on evolution on the market. 

 We are only able to express an opinion on the general philosophical value of 

 the book, for we are not ornithologists, and all the pictures seem to be of birds. 

 No one can realise more than we do the importance of the study of living things 

 by the biologist, whose business is, after all, the elucidation of the nature of living 

 things, and whose practice has been too long limited to the investigation of the 

 structure of carcases. 



The ornithological information imparted by the book has, we believe, already 

 been criticised in Nature, and we refer the reader for information on this point 

 to a recent number of that journal ; but the study of those parts of the book 

 which relate to general questions has not led us to form a very high opinion 

 of the critical faculty or of the philosophical insight of the authors. So many 

 of their statements in the first chapter give the impression of skimming the 

 surface of things, and of not so much failing to get into relation with actuality 

 itself, but of, what is much worse, failing to realise that they are not in this close 

 relation. For instance, "it seems to us that a fatal objection to all these Neo- 

 Lamarckian theories of evolution is that they are based on the assumption that 

 acquired characters are inherited, whereas all the evidence goes to show that 

 such things are not inherited." Any one who uses the expression "the inherit- 

 ance of acquired characters" without first an apology, and secondly a precise 

 statement as to the exact thesis which this expression is intended to convey, runs 



