NEW CONCEPTIONS IN SCIENCE 



Between a moth and a tame crow is a difference of 

 degree only. And a crow is a notably able and 

 crafty bird. We commonly award him very hu- 

 man propensities, so that from a crow to a child is 

 only another series of evenly spaced steps. 



The logical issue of these experiments Dr. Loeb 

 has developed in a book on brain physiology, which 

 deals with some current ideas in a way to ''make 

 wiseacredom rub purblind eyes and stare." For 

 him animals, like plants, are more or less compli- 

 cated arrangements of proteid substances, respond- 

 ing in a very simple way to the ordinary physical 

 forces that we know about us. 



But more curious things were to follow. The 

 unoffending reader who wends his way through the 

 serried pages wherein Dr. Loeb's work is set down 

 will recoil before the Oriental prodigality of large 

 names. Yet the experiments are simple, the mean- 

 ing unmistakable. If by his revelations of the role 

 of the " trophisms" and " tactisms" Dr. Loeb drove 

 boldly into the domain of mental phenomena, his 

 next invasion struck at the dearest tenets of him 

 who deals with the science of forms the mor- 

 phologist. The whole theory of the latter was 

 bound up with the idea that the shape and looks 

 and structure of an animal result from the com- 

 plex arrangements in the germ from whence it 

 springs. That these could be altered at pleasure, 



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