DUBLIN REV. 77 Galley 5 

 Some Recent Books 



THE^extraordinary activity which has been shown by 

 workers in the different fields of the wide domain of 

 biology since the publication of Darwin's first book, the 

 great number of different hypotheses which have been set 

 forth, and the contending views which are held with re- 

 gard to almost all, if not all, of them make the appearance 

 of really adequate works of condensation not only accept* 

 able but even necessary to the ordinary reader who cannot 

 be expected to wade through the morass of monographs 

 and memoirs in which these theories are expounded, de- 

 fended or attacked. The mischief is that these summaries 

 have often been compiled by persons with but slender 

 claims to pronounce opinions upon the important matters 

 with which they set themselves to deal, with the result 

 that we have libraries of rubbishy books by half-informed 

 persons posturing before an ignorant public as men of 

 science. In Mr Lock's Recent Progress in the Study of Varia- 

 tion, Heredity and Evolution (Murray. 73. 6d.), we have a 

 book which can be recommended, for it is written by 

 a man- who thoroughly knows his subject, who is alive to its 

 most recent developments, and who is also what the other 

 kiM of writer never is alive to the fact that even in 

 science everything is not yet fully discovered and deter- 

 mined. In a word he is as modest as the sciolist is cock-sure. 

 ^ Mr Lock frankly writes as a Mendelian and a transmuta- 

 tionist, positions which are not common to all biologists of 

 the day; and he is, as he allows in his preface, profoundly 

 influenced by the personality and work of Bateson, the 

 prophet of discontinuity in development. On this side of 

 the controversy we have never come across a fairer or more 

 complete statement, and those who wish to know what the 



