222 



DISCOVERY 



yet the book should be of the greatest interest not only to 

 psychologists, but to all who are concerned with the prob- 

 lems of sociology'. 



F. A. Hampton. 



Byiiish Plant Names and their Derivations. By R. J. 

 Harvey-Gibson. (A. & C. Black, Ltd.) 



A little book giving interpretations of the names of 

 common British plants. It should prove very useful to 

 students, and enable them to fix in their memory names 

 which often seem rather unintelligible. Some of them 

 are very quaint — for instance " bonus-henricus, L. bonus, 

 good (as distinguished from Mercurialis, called ' bad ') ; 

 heinrich, from German heim, home, as growing in hedges 

 near \-illages. Others derive the name from ' Heinz 

 and Heinrich,' evil spirits against whom the plant was 

 supposed to afford protection. In any case, the name has 

 nothing to do with any Henry, King of England, good 

 or otherwise." Much careful research and sound scholar- 

 ship have gone to the making of this book. 



Great and Small Things. By Sir Ray Lankester, 

 K.C.B., F.R.S. (Methuen & Co., Ltd., 75. 6d.) 



When a distinguished scientist collects his sheaves of 

 scattered papers and articles, written and published in 

 various journals during the last score of years, and presents 

 them in book form, one naturally expects the result to 

 be interesting. And one's expectations are realised in 

 this book, in which, though it contains papers on widely 

 diverse subjects, a sense of unity is preserved since, as the 

 author remarks in his preface, " they all relate to the 

 study of living things ranging from the phagocyte to the 

 gorilla, from the pond-snail to the Russian giant, from 

 facts about longevity to theories as to human progress 

 and the cruelty of Nature." Apart from his writings 

 and individual researches. Sir Ray Lankester has been 

 charged with the responsibility of many important public 

 positions, including the Directorship of the Natural 

 History Department of the British ]\Iuseum, which he 

 held from 1898 to 1906, and the Presidency of the British 

 Association in 1906. In 18S4 he founded the Marine 

 Biological Association. As a man of affairs and as a 

 zoologist his work has been characterised by imagination, 

 enthusiasm, and humanitv. These qualities eminently 

 fit him for explaining new scientific discoveries to readers 

 not possessed of the technical languages in which so many 

 of them are veiled as though in the divine clouds of 

 authority. 



To many readers, however, the most fascinating articles 

 in this book are those which are more concerned with 

 Sir Ray Lankester's atittude to the general problems and 

 questions of life which are simmering in many heads to- 

 day, rather than his lucid descriptions of the phenomena 

 of living matter. For instance, he devotes a chapter to 

 answering the question " Is Nature Cruel ? " Man is 

 a sensitive, self-conscious animal. With every century 

 of civilisation his self-consciousness appears to be 



strengthened and his sensitiveness to mental and physical 

 pain to be increased. This fact is reflected in the modern 

 novel over and over again ; either the novelist introduces 

 pain into his novel and consciously leaves the reader 

 asking, " WTiatis the meaning of it ?" or else he seeks to 

 impose upon his reader the idea of pain, misery, disease, 

 as a mysterious necessity, a part of the scheme of things 

 which must be accepted. Sir Ray Lankester considers 

 that pain does not exist in an'\i:hing like the extreme 

 pangs which we are apt to attribute to it. " Pain is a 

 mental condition which is not measurable either by the 

 nature and severity of an injury or by the cries and 

 struggles which follow such injury." 



The problem of pain has been very carefully studied by 

 the modern schools of psycho]og3^ particularlv by Freud. 

 These studies show clearly that pain is a protective instru- 

 ment ; it tells the animal, including man, that it is hurt, 

 or is threatened with disease. The author not only agrees 

 with this dictum, but goes farther and says that " man 

 has been, and is still being, educated by pain." He 

 considers that " pain is not, in the great scheme of the 

 universe, ' cruel,' but the beneficent guide of the develop- 

 ment of human beings." 



In other chapters the author discusses the problem of 

 old age and longevity, his account of Metchnikoff 's theory 

 of prolonging life being admirably lucid. On the subject 

 of telepathy he says : " It is necessary to remind those 

 who continue to assert that ' telepathy ' is a frequent 

 occurrence and ask us to prove that it is nor — or else to 

 admit that it is — that their method is universally con- 

 demned. It is for them to bring conclusive evidence 

 demonstrating the truth of their contention." In another 

 essay the author shows his sympathy for the idea of 

 human progress and the belief that mankind is not merely 

 driving forward blindly into the dark — a belief which 

 certain men of science have recently been too prone to 

 discourage. 



The essays on the " sinall things," on the Phagocytes 

 or Eater-cells, Pond-snails, the Liver-fluke, Wasps, 

 Spider-sense and Cat-sense, and so forth, are splendid 

 examples of the way in which a scientist with imagination 

 can explain technical subjects in an easj', simple, stimulat- 

 ing way for the benefit of a non-scientific reader, as witness 

 this description of protoplasm : " All living things, whether 

 plants or animals, are either single very minute ' cor- 

 puscles ' of protoplasm — called ' cells ' — or are aggregates, 

 i.e. built-up masses of such cells. Protoplasm is the name 

 given to the very peculiar living, changing ' slime ' or 

 viscid material of which every ' cell ' is constituted. The 

 name ' cell ' was applied two hundred and fifty years ago 

 to the tiny cases, fitted together like the cells of a honey- 

 comb, which the living units, or corpuscles, of protoplasm 

 building up the leaves, stems, flowers, and fruits of plants 

 deposit around themselves. Then the application of the 

 word was actvially transferred from the cell or case to its 

 living, slimy content — just as we say ' a bottle of wine,' 

 meaning the liquid contained in the glass bottle and not 

 the glass bottle itself." 



E. L. 



