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 
codlum non animum we read coeum et 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 jew 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 Reid’s 
newly published essay on the origin of the English flora, we have to 
4—wNAT. sc.—VOL. xv. No. 89. 49 

