July 30, 1891] 



.\ATURE 



?93 



vestigations, and the use made of them in the argument. 

 Interesting and appropriate quotations are inserted from 

 numerous authors of fame and notoriety, as from Plato, 

 Descartes, Leibnitz, and Spencer, down to Tolstoi. But 

 when, after reading right through the book, one asks 

 oneself what has been the net gain, what new ideas it 

 has given, or what valuable facts it has brought together, 

 and what are its solid and original arguments, it is rather 

 difficult to give a satisfactory reply. The book chiefly 

 consists of well-phrased " talkee-talkee," so that some 

 readers may feel a little grateful to so fluent and prolific 

 a writer that he stopped his nimble pen even as soon as 

 he did. One has become nowadays rather satiated with 

 a priori deductions. 



As for the " Heredity " in the title, it is nowhere in the 

 book, except at the end of one chapter, where neither the 

 author in the text nor the translator in the footnotes has 

 shown any misgiving concerning the truth of the old 

 supposition of the free inheritance of acquired faculties, 

 which greatly affects the argument of the work. Un- 

 doubtedly some few men of high authority still entertain 

 the older view, but the majority of students of heredity 

 now regard it as unproved, and at the best, that the 

 inheritance is very slightly efficient. 



The following paragraph will serve as an example of 

 what is least good in the author's style and method : — 



" Why then should not the representation of man, by 

 hereditary tendency, excite in man himself a peculiar 

 pleasure, and an inclination no longer of flight, but to 

 approach, speak, be helped, to put others in his place? 

 When a child falls under the wheels of a carriage, we 

 precipitate ourselves to its rescue by an almost instinctive 

 movement, just as we should start aside from a precipice. 

 The image of others is thus substituted for the image of 

 •ourselves. In the scales of the inner balance, /, thou, are 

 Constantly interchanged. This delicate mechanism is 

 partly produced by heredity. Man is thus domesticated, 

 made gentler, and more civilized ; now he is partially 

 savage, partially civilized or civilizable. The result of 

 education through the ages is thus fixed in heredity 

 itself, and this is one of the proofs of the power possessed 

 by education, if not always for the present, at least for the 

 future." 



Life is short, there is much to learn, and economy of 

 time is important. It is questionable whether it is worth 

 the while of a person who has some acquaintance with 

 the subject of this book to spend half a working day in 

 reading it, for he might not find it as nourishing as he 

 would wish. Still it is not unlikely that those to whom 

 the subject is unfamiliar would gain instruction from the 

 book and would consider it throughout to be interesting. 



F. G. 



The Soul of Man : an Investigation of the Facts of 

 Physiological and Experimental Psychology. By Dr. 

 Paul Carus. (London, Edward Arnold.) 

 It is in vain that a puzzled reader seeks to discover the 

 aim of this book. It is entitled " The Soul of Man," but 

 no explanation is given as to what is meant by the title ; 

 and at the end of forty-six rambling and discursive 

 chapters on things in general, the reader finds himself no 

 wiser. It is called "an Investigation of the Facts of 

 Physiological and Experimental Psychology," but there is 

 no investigation of facts in the book. The rudiments of 

 anatomy, of embryology, of neurology, &c., are set forth, 

 much in the form in which they can be found in ele- 

 mentary text-books on the subjects, but the facts thus 

 presented are not investigated ; they are presented in no 

 new light, no new conclusions are drawn from them, and 

 the object of their presentation does not appear. Here 

 and there, indeed, the author states a belief for which in 

 the preface he claims originality ; he considers, for in- 

 stance, that consciousness (which he calls a concentrated 

 or intensified feeling— an additional element that some- 



NO. 1 135, VOL. 44] 



times is, and sometimes is not, attached to mental 

 operations) is "produced" in the corpus striatum. It 

 does not appear, however, that this hypothesis leads to 

 anything, or has any appreciable bearing on the " problem 

 of the human soul," whatever that may be. Dr. Carus 

 thinks, too, that man has two souls, a central soul and a 

 peripheral soul ; and it is thus that he explains the 

 familiar fact that certain purposive actions are unattended 

 with consciousness ; but we cannot say that this explana- 

 tion makes the matter any clearer. As a contribution to 

 science, the book cannot be commended. Whether it 

 has a theological value, we must leave to others to say. 



LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 



[ The Editor does not hold himself responsible for opinions ex- 

 pressed by his correspondents. Ndther can he undertake 

 to return, or to correspond with the writers of, rejected 

 manuscripts intended for this or any other part of "i^iATW-K. 

 No notice is taken of anonymous communications. ] 

 The Recent Earthquakes in Italy. 

 With reference to the letter which appears in your issue of 

 July 23 (p. 272), on the earthquakes having occurred at Vesuvius 

 on June 7, and on the same day in Southern Australia, I would 

 ask leave to point out that the localities mentioned lie in the 

 vicinity of a great circle which I call the "south-west coast 

 of Australia great circle " (that is, the coast-line between Cape 

 Hamlin and Cape Chatham). Melbourne would be about 370 

 miles north of its direction, and it cuts Italy in the neighbourhood 

 of Catanzaro, leaving Vesuvius about 65 miles to the north. 

 This great circle is one of maximum compression on the earth's 

 surface — that is, it lies for the most part on the ocean surface, 

 its greatest extent on land being in traversing Arabia, which it 

 crosses in a north-west, south-east direction. 



It is also worth noting that, while you cite in the same issue 

 two shocks as having occurred in the ^olian Islands on June 24 

 (of these, Stromboli lies about 40 miles south of the direction 

 of this great circle), there was recorded on that day, in the 

 newspapers, an earthquake shock as having taken place on the 

 23rd (midnight) at Charleston, South Carolina, which lies about 

 650 miles to the north-west of the direction of the great circle 

 in question at this point, and therefore approximatively in the 

 vicinity. J. F. O'Reilly. 



Royal College of Science for Ireland, 

 Stephen's Green, Dublin, July 24. 



The Great Comet of 1882. 

 In your issue of May 28 (p. 82) is a communication about the 

 comet of 1882 as seen in the act of passing close to the sun. As 

 attention has thus been called to that comet, I desire to report a 

 remarkable peculiarity of the tail as observed by myself, October 

 3, 1882, about daybreak. It was my first view of this glorious 

 comet. Other persons on the east sides of the islands had seen 

 it several days earlier. The peculiarity noted was the abrupt 

 ending of the tail, which was cut off sharply at an oblique angle, 

 on an incurved line. The following representation is copied 



from one in my note-book made at the time. AA represents 

 the eastern ridge of the Kahakuloa Canyon on the north end of 

 Maui, where I was sleeping. B is the brilliant end of the vast 

 tail like a scimitar bjade, fully as bright as the moon. C is 



