22 



The Journal of Heredity 



Table 3. A comparison of flic measurements of an abnormal hand (No. 7) 

 with the average of those from five normal hands. 



Social and Biological Heredity 



Social Change, by William Field- 

 ing Ogburn, Professor of Sociology 

 at Barnard College. Price $1.50. 

 B. W. Huebsch, New York. 1922. 

 A careful discrimination between 

 biological and cultural changes char- 

 acterizes this book. Professor Ogburn 

 is himself convinced and convinces 

 his readers that the failure to make 

 such discrimination in the past has 

 been the cause of much confused and 

 faulty thinking. Why is there such 

 a thing as social progress at all? Why 

 new cultures, new inventions, new 

 acquirements ? Is it due to the evo- 

 lutionary development of human biolo- 

 gic structure or is it due to other 

 causes — cultural influences under which 

 or through which man is called to 

 pass? Such questions are intimately 

 discussed and the result is illuminative. 

 We are especially impressed by an 

 illustrative item by which the author 

 explained his thesis as to the fact of a 

 cultural progress in the race wholly 

 separate from any biologic change in 

 individuals. It was a list carefully 



compiled of some one hundred and 

 fifty instances of duplicate inventions 

 — of inventions made at the same time 

 by two or more students or experi- 

 mentors. The conviction was ines- 

 capable that inventions come, inevit- 

 ably, at certain stages of culture, not 

 because there happened a single indi- 

 vidual of greater mental capacity, but 

 because social conditions were at a 

 stage when such inventions were both 

 needed and were possible on the basis 

 of preceding discoveries. Then, evi- 

 dently, they came, and to more than 

 one mind. It has been social progress 

 rather than progress of individual gifts 

 that has given man his great discov- 

 eries. 



The two sections of the book, the 

 first on the why and how of social 

 change, and the second on the why 

 and how of the drag or slow process 

 of that change, are each of them in- 

 teresting l)()th in themselves and in 

 the suggestive illustrations drawn from 

 studies of contemporary facts or time- 

 ly problems. — R. E. C. 



