SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE. 707 



difficulty. The descriptions are attractively written, and embrace over one 

 hundred of the commoner birds of eastern North America. " There are 

 results to be derived from the study of birds," Mr. Chapman remarks, "that 

 add to our pleasure in field and wood, and give fresh interest to walks that 

 before were eventless ; that quicken both ear and eye, making us hear and 

 see where before we were deaf and blind. ... I would enter a special plea," 

 he continues, "for the study of birds in the schools ; for the more general 

 introduction of ornithology in natural history courses. Frogs and cray- 

 fish serve an excellent purpose, but we may not encounter either of them 

 after leaving the laboratory, whereas birds not only offer excellent oppor- 

 tunities for study but are always about us, and even a slight familiarity 

 with them will be of value long after school days are over." 



The character of history is undergoing a most gratifying elevation. 

 Formerly its chief function was io chronicle battles, assassinations, and 

 slaughters, but it is coming more and more to depict the social, political, 

 economic, and intellectual progress of man, to which wars are deplorable 

 interruptions. In describing that movement of thought whose culmination 

 is the greatest intellectual event of the nineteenth century, Mr. Clodd* is 

 writing the highest kind of history. No theory of the first rank has ever 

 sprung complete from the brain of one man, hence it is not strange that 

 conceptions leading up to the doctrine of evolution were formed in the 

 minds of philosophers who lived in the intellectual day that preceded the 

 dark ages. Following Prof. Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy in his sur- 

 vey of the thought of this time, Mr. Clodd takes the belief of Thales that 

 each thing is formed by a change from something pre existent as the 

 earliest recorded germ of the evolutionary theory, and points out develop- 

 ments of this idea in the writings of other philosophers down to Lucretius. 

 After Lucretius came the period denoted by our author as the Arrest of 

 Inquiry, extending from A. D. 50 to A. D. 1600. Toward the end of this 

 period Columbus, Copernicus, Vesalius, Brahe, and Bruno appeared as 

 forerunners of the renascence of science. From 1600 to about 1830 the 

 work contributing most conspicuously to scientific progress was done by 

 Linnaeus, Buffon, Cuvier, and Lamarck. Buffon taught the nonfixity of 

 species and Lamarck worked out a general theory of descent. At and after 

 their time lived two or three men who are remembered not for any con- 

 structive work that they did in science, but for being " anticipators of Dar- 

 win," because they stated, without proofs, an outline of the evolutionary 

 doctrine earlier than 1858. 



But it is modern evolution in which Mr. Clodd's readers will be most 

 interested, and he does well to devote full half of his volume to the work 

 of Spencer, Darwin, and Wallace, and their exponent Huxley. Begin- 

 ning with Darwin, the author tells the chief events of his life, giving the 

 dates when his notable statements as to organic evolution were made and 

 describing the reception that they met with. Each of the others is treated 

 in a similar way, and, in the case of Spencer, dates are given which prove 

 that he had formulated the general doctrine of which Darwinism is a part 

 before the views of Darwin and Wallace were made public. In describing 



* Pioneers of Evolution, from Thales to Huxley. By Edward Clodd. New York: D. Appleton & 

 Co. Pp. 274, 12mo. Price, $1.CO. 



