Literary Notices. xlvii 



the clinical work prosecuted by the author or under his direction upon 

 post-paroxysmal albuminaria, urinary toxicity and the condition of the 

 blood of epileptics. • c. j. h. 



Organic Selection.' 



Professor Baldwin's argument is interesting as an illustration of 

 an attempt to escape from the doctrine of inheritance of acquired 

 characters through the mediation of "organic selection." Acquired 

 characters or individual adaptations, while not directly inherited, are 

 influential in determining the course of evolution indirectly ; for such 

 modifications keep certain animals alive and in this way screen the 

 variations which they represent from the action of natural selection 

 and so allow new variations in the same directions to arise in the next 

 and following generations; while variations in other directions are not 

 thus kept alive and so are lost. "The species will therefore make 

 progress in the same directions as those first marked out by the ac- 

 quired modifications and will gradually ' pick up ' by congenital vari- 

 ation the same characters which were at first only individually acquired. 

 The result will be the same, as to these characters, as if they had 

 been directly inherited, and the appearance of such heredity in these 

 cases, at least, will be fully explained." 



The reviewer is unable to see how the process described and illus- 

 trated differs from the inheritance of acquired characters or, if these 

 be excluded, how the species " picks up " the characters. The illus- 

 tration chosen of the young fowls kept alive by the fact that the mother 

 teaches them to drink until the drink instinct is developed would, if 

 substantiated, be a clear case of inheritance of acquired habit. Al- 

 though we do not perceive the force of the author's claim for organic 

 selection we are grateful for the emphasis laid on intelligence as a fac- 

 tor of evolution. c. l. h. 



The Discrimiiiatiou Threshold for Distances oii the.Sl£in.' 



This extensive paper should at least serve a good purpose in check- 

 ing much wasteful effort in this line due to uncritical methods. In the 

 first place it makes very plain that much which has been attributed to 

 the results of practice grows out of suggestion and that the subject 

 who is ignorant of the nature and results of the experiment becomes 



1 Baldwin, J. Mark. Determinate Evolution. Princeton Contr. to Psych. 



''■ Tawney. Ueber die Wahrenehmung zweier Punkte mittelst des Tast- 

 sinnes. Princeton Contr. to Psychology, II, i, 1897. 



