feos) 1, ZOOLOGIST ON THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENCE 433 
necessarily false. “As I understand Agassiz,” says Dr. Brooks, “it is 
not because natural history is a language that he holds it to be 
intended; but because it is delightful to listen to the language of 
nature, and because it abounds in beneficial instruction for mankind.” 
And again: “As I understand Berkeley, it is not because nature is 
orderly, but because the order of nature is useful, and instructive, and 
full of delights for living things, that he holds it to be a language.” 
Let us admit that response to nature and the study of nature are all 
these things; it does not therefore follow that the language is necessary 
or unnecessary, and I do not see how it follows that the language is 
intended. It may be so, but, on the other hand, “ the modern zoologist 
must also ask whether natural selection, so far as it accounts for living 
things and their works and ways, does not in the same measure account 
for language; both that which men use among themselves and that 
which we find in nature” (p. 337). 
We close the book, then, as ignorant of fundamental truths as when 
we opened it. But we have now reasons for our ignorance. Professor 
Brooks, in so far as he has adhered to his maxim——“ The assertion that 
outstrips evidence is a crime ”—has convinced us of his main thesis, 
which indeed is a corollary of that statement, and may be expressed in 
the words on the wrapper of this Review : 
Nunquam aliud natura, aliud sapientia dicit. 
BRITISH MusEuM 
(Natural History), 
: Lonpon, S.W. 
