August 13, 1891] 



NATURE 



339 



Thales and Ahaxagoras, the speculations of Leibnitz, 

 Da Maillet, Wright, Lambert, Herschel, and La Place. 

 Of Buffon he says : — 



" Buffon was the naturalist of the day in the time of 

 Louis XV. and Louis XVL, — a period somewhat famous 

 for the restrictions which were placed upon men, and the 

 denunciations with which new and advanced ideas were 

 received. Thus advanced thinkers found that their 

 theories in many instances, instead of leading them on to 

 fame, but opened the doors of the Bastile. 



" It is not improbable that Buffon was in accord with 

 the feeling of the time, as while his great discursive work — 

 'Histoire Naturelle,'of 1749-88 — fully outlines the theory 

 of evolution, in which he was a believer, it is done in an 

 ironical, partly satirical manner, so that he could, if at- 

 tacked, retreat by claiming that it was a satire on the 

 advanced scientific thought of the time ; ... he was ready 

 to believe that from a single unit in the beginning might 

 have descended all the various forms of existing animal 

 and plant life. It is curious to note that this pioneer 

 evolutionist suddenly corrects himself and says : ' But 

 no ; it is certain from revelation that every species was 

 directly created by a separate fiat.' We may suspect that 

 this secession from a position so broadly taken was forced 

 upon the evolutionist. Perhaps the clergy gave him 

 close and suggestive attention, and he was offered the 

 choice between the Bastile, the Sorbonne, and apology to 

 offended orthodoxy. Be this as it may, Buffon was one 

 of the early delineators of the modern theory of evolution, 

 and despite his peculiar altitude, history accords him this 

 recognition." 



The works of Wolff, of Goethe, Geoffroy St. Hilaire 

 Oken, Pander, Von Baer, Schleiden and Schwann, Von 

 Mohl and Max Schultze, Lord Monboddo and Erasmus 

 Darwin, are all referred to in due order ; and a well- 

 bestowed paragraph of praise is given to Lamarck. 

 Later writers, such as Robert Chambers, Von Humboldt, 

 Owen, Asa Gray, Herbert Spencer, and Youmans, bring 

 us down to the birth of modern Darwinism. 



To English readers the last (twentieth, but erroneously 

 headed eighteenth) chapter will bs one of the most inter- 

 esting. It is entitled " The Darwin Memorial," and 

 contains a series of addresses by American men of 

 science, delivered at a special memorial meeting of the 

 Biological Society of Washington soon after the death of 

 the illustrious naturalist in 1882. The address of Dr. 

 Theodore Gill, of the Smithsonian Institution, is a master- 

 piece of eloquence, treating of " The Doctrine of 

 Darwin," and contrasting the doctrines of special crea- 

 tion and evolution. The address by William Dall, of the 

 United States National Museum, is equally eloquent, and 

 treats of Darwin in the form of a biographical sketch. 

 Dr. John Powell, the Director of the United States Geo- 

 logical Survey, follows with an admirable address on 

 " Darwin's Coatributions to Philosophy." We cannot 

 refrain from transcribing some of his remarks; — 



" But Darwin's investigations have not ended research 

 or completed philosophy. He brought scientific men to 

 the frontiers of truth, and showed them a path across the 

 border. Yet more than this he did. He pointed out one 

 of the fundamental methods of research. Before his 

 time philosophers talked about deductive methods and 

 inductive methods. Darwin has taught us that both are 

 fruitless. ... By inductive methods, men are to collect 

 facts, unbiased by opinions or preconceived theories. 

 They are to gather the facts, put them together, arrange 

 and combine them to find higher and still higher gene- 

 ralizations. But there are facts and facts— facts with 



NO II 37, VOL. 44] 



value, and facts without value. The indiscriminate 

 gathering of facts leads to no important discoveries. Men 

 might devote themselves to counting the leaves on the 

 trees, the blades of grass in the meadows, the grains of 

 sand on the sea-shore ; they might weigh each one and 

 measure each one, and go on collecting such facts until 

 libraries were filled and the minds of men buried under 

 their weight, and no addition would be made to philo- 

 sophy thereby. There must be some method of selecting, 

 some method of determining what facts are valuable and 

 what facts are trivial. The fool collects facts ; the wise 

 man selects them. Amid the multiplicity of facts in the 

 universe, how does the wise man choose for his use? The 

 true scientific man walks not at random through the 

 world, making notes of what he sees ; he chooses some 

 narrow field of investigation ; ... his investigations are 

 always suggested by some hypothesis — some supposition 

 of what he may discover. He may find that his hypo- 

 thesis is wrong, and discover something else ; but without 

 an hypothesis he discovers nothing. . . . Working hypo- 

 theses are the instruments with which scientific men 

 select facts. By them, reason and imagination are con- 

 joined, and all the powers of the mind employed in 

 research." 



The succeeding address, by Dr. C. V. Riley, gives an 

 account of Darwin's entomological work, and comprises a 

 graphic description of the naturalist in his home, drawn 

 from personal reminiscences of a visit to Down. Dr. 

 Lester Ward follows with his address on " Darwin as a 

 Botanist," in the course of which he discusses, among 

 other points, the bearing of Darwin's researches on the 

 power of movement in plants on the great question 

 wrapped up in the expression "tendency to vary." Dr. 

 Frank Baker contributes the next address, on the expres- 

 sion of the emotions, and in this we again meet with a 

 spirited advocacy of the Darwinian method : — 



" But not as a fact-gatherer do we find him greatest. 

 Many others have struggled with ant-like toil to amass 

 piles of facts, which, like the ant-heap, remain but sand 

 after all. Darwin brings to his work an informing spirit, 

 the genius of scientific hypothesis. Breathed upon by 

 this spirit, the dry bones of fact come together ' bone to 

 his bone,' the sinews and the flesh come upon them, they 

 become alive and stand upon their feet, * an exceeding 

 great army.' He searches always for the principles which 

 underlie the facts and make them possible, realizing that 

 Xkit. phenomena, the things which are seen, are temporal 

 and transitory ; the things which are not seen, the 

 cosmical forces which govern and control, are eternal." 



A Darwinian bibliography; by Frederick W. True, the 

 Librarian of the United States National Museum, and an 

 appendix giving a list of Darwin's works, conclude a 

 volume of which enough has been said to commend it to 

 all readers, whether youthful or adult, and which we on 

 this side of the Atlantic cannot but appreciate as a most 

 inspiriting picture of the life and work of the man who, of 

 all others, has helped to emblazon our country's fame on 

 the scientific scroll of the nineteenth century. 



R.Meldola. 



PINES AND FIRS OF JAPAN. 

 Monographic der Abieiineen des Japanischen Reiches. 

 Bearbeitet von Dr. Heinrich Mayr. Mit 7 Colorirten 

 Tafeln. (Munchen : M. Nieger'sche Universitats 

 Buchhandlung, 1890.) 



FROM the time of Kaempfer and that of Thunberg to 

 our own day, the Japanese Conifers have been the 

 objects of special predilection on the part of botanists. 



