REVIEWS 665 



equipped with sundry fine words and phrases but his mind— if he have one — will 

 be in a hopeless muddle. 



At the end of eleven pages of terribly thin talk — there is no other term for it — 

 he will scarcely be comforted on hearing that " the ' soul ' of Descartes' philosophy 

 corresponds more or less closely with the ' vital force ' of some more recent writers 

 and the ' entelechy ' of others," especially as he is left without an explanation of 

 the blessed word entelechy. 



To attempt to elucidate the nature of life in so brief a space is out of the question : 

 the whole chapter should be scrapped whenever anew edition of the book is pre- 

 pared. Until proper training has been given in things fundamental in chemistry 

 and physics, it will be impossible for students to grasp even the simplest concep- 

 tions of vital problems and the present-day biologist is certainly incompetent to 

 discuss the philosophy of so vast a subject as that of the nature of life, which is 

 admittedly an infinitely intricate nexus of complex chemical events. If we are 

 to write books that are to be of use to students, we must school ourselves to talk 

 only of things we can and do comprehend and they can understand. 



The later chapters of the book are open to similar criticism, in so far as they do 

 not relate to matters specifically zoological, which are usually treated clearly and in 

 an interesting manner. 



To refer to only a few points — surely it is undesirable even to mention to abso- 

 lute beginners the attempts that have been made to explain the dynamics of 

 mitosis— of which we are in absolute ignorance from A to Z, whatever cytologists 

 may say. 



Variation and heredity, subjects of infinite importance, are dealt with in 

 sixty-two pages in Part III., chapters xi-xiv. : the treatment is of the kind to be 

 expected in articles of the popular magazine type ; no beginner could possibly 

 make much of the jumble of statements brought under notice. In this section, 

 the inheritance of acquired characters is dealt with in away which makes it pretty 

 clear that the author is a believer in the doctrine : parenthetically we may say that 

 whatever the force of the arguments in its favour may be, we are convinced that if 

 there be one character that is not acquired it is the art of writing books success- 

 fully — this seems to be born in the very few. 



The kind of logic used in dealing with the subject of inheritance will be apparent 

 from the following statement on the last page but one of the book : 



" Man has indeed acquired a degree of control over his environment and over 

 his own destiny which distinguishes him from any of the lower animals but at the 

 same time the conditions of his life have become far more complex and the young, 

 at any rate in civilised communities, have to go through a long course of education 

 before they are fit to enter upon the struggle for existence on their own account. 

 Amongst the lower animals, all or almost all the faculties necessary for existence 

 are directly inherited from the parents, incorporated in the organism itself ; but 

 man inherits in this way only a relatively small proportion of the powers which he 

 requires to carry on his life. The greater part of human experience is of too 

 recent origin to have become heritable ; it has to be acquired afresh by education 

 in every generation and in this respect is strikingly contrasted with the instincts 

 of the lower animals." 



Much of the difficulty in discussing this all-important subject arises probably 

 from the loose manner in which the term " acquired character " is used at the 

 present time. The untutored human being apparently is much like the exposed 

 photographic plate— the latent image is there but requires to be developed : it may 



