NATURE 



553 



THURSDAY, OCTOBER i8, 1900. 



THE SUBORDINATION OF THE INDIVIDUAL 

 TO THE WELFARE OF THE SPECIES. 



The Foundations of Zoology. By William Keith Brooks, 

 Ph.D., LL.D,, Professor of Zoology in the Johns 

 Hopkins University. Pp. viii + 339. (Columbia Uni- 

 versity Press. New York : The Macmillan Co. 

 London : Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1899.) 



THIS volume forms the fifth of the Columbia Uni- 

 versity Biological Series edited by Prof. H. F. 

 Osborn and Prof. E. B. Wilson, and it is appropriately 

 placed beside the well-known earlier memoirs which deal 

 with historic, phylogenelic and ontogenetic evolution. 

 The traditions of the series are sufficient warrant for 

 the admirable editing, printing and general appearance 

 of the volume. 



The author arranges his work in fourteen chapters 

 corresponding to thirteen lectures, the sixth being divided 

 into two parts. The subjects which follow the intro- 

 ductory lecture are " Huxley, and the Problem of the 

 Naturalist," " Nature and Nurture," " Lamarck," " Mi- 

 gration in its Bearing on Lamarckism," forming the titles 

 of the second, third, fourth and fifth lectures. The sixth 

 deals with " Zoology and the Philosophy of Evolution," 

 and its second part with the views of Galton and Weis- 

 mann. "Galton, and the Statistical Study of Inherit- 

 ance" is the subject of the seventh, and "Darwin and 

 the Origin of Species" that of the eighth lecture, the 

 subjects of the remaining lectures being " Natural Selec- 

 tion and the Antiquity of Life," " Natural Selection and 

 Natural Theology,'' " Paley, and the Argument from 

 Contrivance," "The Mechanism of Nature" and " Louis 

 Agassiz and George Berkely." The titles are quoted in 

 full, inasmuch as it will be recognised that the author's 

 arrangement is unusual, both as regards treatment and 

 the choice of some of the subjects. The same observa- 

 tion is true of the separate lectures : we everywhere 

 meet with interesting views and modes of statement 

 which are individual and original, and evidently repre- 

 sent the deep personal convictions of the author upon 

 subjects to which he has devoted much time and thought. 

 It may be questioned, however, whether the printed 

 lecture is not an inconvenient form in which to address 

 a wider audience than can be gathered in any hall or 

 theatre. The spoken lecture is the best of all forms of 

 communicating ideas, because we have the speaker's 

 personality associated with his thoughts. But the form 

 of a lecture is in large part determined because its sub- 

 stance is conveyed so easily and rapidly by speech and 

 hearing. The same idea must often be repeated in 

 diflferent words, in order that it may be grasped and 

 remembered before passing to others ; and an argument 

 may, and often should, be drawn out and enforced at a 

 length which would be unnecessary and even tedious in 

 a printed memoir. The lecturer has the great advantage 

 that he can omit or expand according as he realises the 

 extent to which his audience is in touch with him. 

 When ideas are conveyed in print, the conditions are, of 

 course, entirely different. When the reader does not 

 fully understand, he can pause and reflect, and can read 

 NO. I 616, VOL. 62] 



again without losing the sequent ideas. Hence the form 

 can, and should, be far more terse and condensed, and 

 the argument does not need the same enforcement, while 

 the repetition so necessary in a lecture is apt to become 

 irritating. 



Allowing for these qualities, which are essential to a 

 lecture, the chapters are most interesting and stimulating. 



In estimating the life-work of Huxley, the author 

 rightly places in the foreground the great and successful 

 struggle for intellectual liberty. 



" To what nobler end could life be devoted than the 

 attempt to show us how we may 'learn to distinguish 

 truth from falsehood, in order to be clear about our 

 actions, and to walk sure-footedly in this life.' If he has 

 succeeded, and every zoologist who is free to follow 

 nature wherever she may lead is a witness that he has 

 succeeded— if, as the end of his lifelong labour, intel- 

 lectual freedom is established on a firmer basis — this is 

 his best monument, even if the man should quickly be 

 forgotten in the accomplishment of his end. No 

 memorial could be more appropriate than the speedy 

 establishment of that intellectual liberty which is not 

 intellectual licence on a basis so firm that the history of 

 the struggle to obtain it shalU become a forgotten 

 antiquity" (p. 35). 



Space prevents further allusion to the interesting 

 criticism of Huxley's philosophy, and the statement of 

 the particular parts of it which have proved to be of the 

 highest value to the author. 



"The interminable question whether ' acquired charac- 

 ters ' are inherited " is not directly attacked by the 

 author ; but it is indirectly attacked in an extremely 

 interesting and effective way. Granted that such inheri- 

 tance is possible, the author inquires how far it is of 

 value in accounting for the facts of natural history, and 

 concludes that it is of no importance. The third lecture 

 especially deals with this subject, although it recurs in 

 various places throughout the volume. The discussion 

 opens with a most appropriate reference to the teachings 

 of Aristotle. 



" Herbert Spencer tells us that the segmentation of the 

 backbone is the inherited effect of fractures, caused by 

 bending ; but Aristotle has shown (' Parts of Animals,' 

 I., i.) that Empedocles and the ancient writers err in 

 teaching that the bendings to which the backbone has 

 been subjected are the cause of its joints, since the thing 

 to be accounted for is not the presence of the joints, but 

 the fitness of the joints for the needs of their possessor. 

 It is an odd freak of history that we of the end of the 

 nineteenth century are called upon to reconsider a dogma 

 which was not only repudiated two thousand years ago, 

 but was even then antiquated." 



The writer warns us that the tendency of exclusive 

 laboratory teaching may be to lead us to forget Aristotle's 

 principle ; and he devotes the whole of this most im- 

 portant chapter to the demonstration, from the discussion 

 of numerous e.xamples, that the problem of fitness is the 

 real problem which confronts the naturalist, and that it is 

 entirely untouched by the explanation of nature as 

 inherited nurture. The chapter concludes with a most 

 convincing reply to the opposing arguments of an English 

 writer. The author unfortunately omits a reference to the 

 publication from which he quotes. The same omission is 

 to be noted in other cases, as in the quotation from 

 Agassiz on p. 16. 



C C 



