1896. NOTES AND COMMENTS. 5 



American Criticism of Romanes. 



Professor Brooks is not the only American biologist who 

 dissents from the views expressed in the last volume of Romanes' 

 " Darwin and after Darwin." In Science (i8g6, pp. 438 and 538), 

 Professor Mark Baldwin, a distinguished authority upon psychology, 

 §ives weighty reasons against Romanes' interpretation of instincts as 

 lapsed intelligence, as, in fact, the inherited memory of acquired 

 habits. Professor Baldwin's criticism is so condensed that it would 

 be impossible to give a short account of his arguments. He discusses 

 the relation of intelligence to coadaptations, the relative utilities of 

 instinct and intelligent actions, and all the points that Romanes 

 raised in support of his assumption of the Lamarckian factor. He 

 comes to the conclusion that "on the more general definition of 

 intelhgence, which includes in it all conscious imitation, use of 

 material instruction and that sort of thing (the vehicle of ' social 

 heredity') ... we still find the principle of natural selection operative 

 and adequate, possibly, to the production of instincts and reflexes." 



Ret2ius on the Inheritance of Acquired Characters. 



Dr. Gustaf Retzius devotes a chapter of his latest publication 

 (" Biologische Untersuchungen," neue Folge, vii., Jena, 1895), to the 

 question of the inheritance of acquired characters. After a brief 

 historical introduction, he describes the investigations of Manouvrier, 

 CoUignon, Sir WilHam Turner, Arthur Thomson, and Havelock 

 Charles into a number of peculiarities of human skeletons. The 

 characters are all well known to anatomists, and are such as the 

 presence of an additional facet on the distal end of the tibia, where it 

 rubs against the neck of the astragulus in cases like that of the 

 Veddah, who is able to bend his foot nearer the shin than is possible 

 for most men ; or that condition of the knee where the facets on the 

 upper end of the tibia are not horizontal, as in normal Europeans, but 

 are inclined backwards. It has been shown that these and a number 

 of other conditions are common among the lower races ; they have 

 been found in fossil skeletons, and among some of the monkeys. 

 Recently it has been argued that some of the characters are excellent 

 instances of an inheritance of acquired characters. Dr. Havelock 

 Charles, for instance, associates the bent condition of the knee with 

 the habit among many of the lower races of resting in a sitting 

 posture, with the knees bent extraordinarily far outwards. He con- 

 cluded that the abnormal condition was a result of the pecuhar 

 attitude, and, as he found it to exist in embryos of the races which 

 had the adult habit, he suggested that a character acquired by adults 

 had been transmitted to descendants. It occurred to Dr. Retzius 

 that abnormahties found among so many different races, among 

 ancient and modern men, could scarcely be a character acquired 

 recently and convergently. He examined a large number of Swedish 



