March, 1896. SOME NEW BOOKS. 201 



possibility of the inheritance of acquired characters in his theory. 

 Perhaps it was too much to expect from Romanes that he should 

 have withdrawn or altered his " Examination " ; but for this volume 

 there was no excuse. Professor Romanes was not ignorant, and his 

 editor has no business to be ignorant, that the attack upon Weismann 

 is based on a position which Weismann does not hold. 



The longer part of this section is devoted to a summation and 

 criticism of the evidence in favour of use-inheritance. The most 

 interesting and novel part of this is the suggestion that the acquisition 

 of reflex actions furnishes indirect evidence in favour of use-inheritance. 

 A brainless dog, for instance, will make scratching movements with 

 its paws when its sides are irritated. Romanes suggests that even if 

 the removal of parasites could have been of advantage in the struggle 

 for existence, a dog with a brain would have removed them by a 

 conscious act, and a reflex act, therefore, would not have been pro- 

 duced by selection. But the memory of the habit, if transmitted, 

 might be the source of the reflex on the supposition of use-inheritance 

 being a fact. 



We admit freely the ingenuity of the argument. But we know 

 too little of the real nature of reflex actions to base any sound argu- 

 ment upon the nature of their acquisition. Moreover, it seems to us 

 plain that the possession of reflexes is of the highest utility to any 

 creature. It is no answer to say that reflexes can always be re- 

 placed by conscious acts. Nothing is more difficult than to perform 

 two conscious correlated movements of different kind simultaneously, 

 as anyone may see who tries to card wool in different directions 

 with each hand at the same time. The chapter on the direct evidence 

 in favour of the inheritance of acquired characters gives an account of 

 many experiments upon guinea-pigs and so forth, in which Romanes, 

 following Brown-Sequard, tried to gain evidence of the inherited 

 results of nervous lesions. The chapter only makes us regret more 

 than ever the early death of the author. He was admirably patient 

 in executing experiments, and brilliant in conceiving them. But he 

 had not got nearly far enough to show positive or negative evidence 

 of any validity. In fact, we feel that the whole of this section upon 

 characters as acquired and hereditary has little scientific value. 



The last section of the volume deals with characters as adaptive 

 and specific. It is directed mainly against the position, urged with 

 great force by Wallace, that all specific characters are either directly 

 useful or are correlated with characters directly useful. Romanes' 

 method is to produce instance after instance of characters whose 

 specific nature is admitted, but whose utility it is impossible to see. 

 For our own part, we find such arguments not a little futile. The 

 study of correlations is in its infancy. Exact inquiry into the relations 

 between death-rates and variations is equally young, and upon these 

 two must depend any definite knowledge of the "way the wheels go 

 round " in organic nature. None the less, this last section of Romanes' 

 volume is exceedingly interesting, and more than justifies a book 

 whose earlier part requires no small justification. 



Hen slow versus Darwin. 

 The Origin of Plant Structures by Self-adaptation to the Environment. 



By the Rev. George Henslow. Pp. xiii., 256; Int. Sci. Series, vol. 77 



London : Kegan Paul & Co., 1895. Price 5s. 

 Mr. Henslow aims high. He is going to prove that natural selection 

 plays no part in the origin of species. In a former volume of the same 

 series, " The Origin of Floral Structures through Insect and other 



