REVIEWS. 



Heredity.— J. Arthur Thomson, M.A., Regius Professor of 

 Natural History in the University of Aberdeen. The 

 Progressive Science Series. ■ John Murray, London. Price 

 95. net. Pp. G05. 



Professor J. Arthur Thomson is the Ruskin of Biology. His 

 Avritings partake alike of the mellowness of Autiimn and the 

 freshening vigour of the Spring. They are full of the hopeful 

 joys that arise perennially from the vernal freshness, and they 

 spread a golden hue over the pessimism that is eternally born 

 of all experience. As one reads his book, one begins uncon- 

 sciously to paint life as a resplendent far northern sunset, a scene 

 of purple hills and placid waters, lying bathed in their entirety 

 beneath a rose-red splendour that emanates from a silver sun. 

 This psychological effect is due not to the matter of the state- 

 ments but to the poetry of their utterance, for Professor Thomson 

 is far too accurate to lead us by his statements into that Utopia 

 which is born of dreamers but is demolished by Biology. 



Most of us have to be content with the prosaic utterance that 

 " the unfit among organisms are eliminated while the fit survive." 

 But in Professor Thomson's book it is given to us in the language 

 of imagery : " Rotten twigs are always falling off the tree of 

 life. There is a continual irrecoverable precipitation of incapables, 

 who thus cease to muddy the stream." In this way he paints at 

 once, on the canvas of the mind, a picture of the process of 

 Natural Selection. There can be none so uninstructed that they 

 do not at once grasp the meaning of this destruction from the 

 mental image thus called forth by analogy. 



Now and then. Professor Thomson allows the golden sunset 

 to sink, and in the colder, if clearer light, of advanced dawn, the 

 ruggedness of life and its pitiless inexorableness, is allowed to 

 break upon our vision. Equally well timed and written is his 

 warning that: " Besides the advance of preventive medicine, the 

 spreading enthusiasm for health, the awakening of a eugenic con- 

 science, the suggestions as to 'marriage-licenses' and other forms of 

 social selection, all making for the greater healthfulness of the 



