August 29, 1895] 



NA TURE 



411 



love, not egoism, is the motive which the final history of 

 every species justifies." And so on to some beautiful 

 socialistic sentiment and anticipations of "the domin- 

 ance of a common civic ideal, which to naturalists is 

 known as a Symbiosis." And Prof. Geddes writes 

 tumultuously in the same vein — a kind of pulpit science 

 — many hopeful things of " Renascence," and the " Elixir 

 of Life!" 



Now there is absolutely no justification for these sweep- 

 ing assertions, this frantic hopefulness, this attempt to 

 belittle the giants of the Natural Selection period of bio- 

 logical history. There is nothing in Symbiosis or in 

 any other group of phenomena to warrant the state- 

 ment that the representation of all life as a Struggle 

 for Existence is a libel on Nature. Because some 

 species have abandoned fighting in open order, each 

 family for itself, as some of the larger carnivora do, 

 for a fight in masses after the fashion of the ants, 

 because the fungus fighting its brother fungus has armed 

 itself with an auxiliary alga, because man instead of killing 

 his cattle at sight preserves them against his convenience, 

 and fights with advertisements and legal process instead 

 of with flint instruments, is life therefore any the less a 

 battle-field ? Has anything arisen to show that the seed 

 of the unfit need not perish, that a species may wheel into 

 line with new conditions without the generous assistance 

 of Death, that where the life and breeding" of every indi- 

 vidual in a species is about equally secure, a degenerative 

 process must not inevitably supervene ? As a matter of 

 fact Natural Selection grips us more grimly than it ever 

 did, because the doubts thrown upon the inheritance of 

 acquired characteristics have deprived us of our trust in 

 education as a means of redemption for decadent families. 

 In our hearts we all wish that the case was not so, we all 

 hate Death and his handiwork ; but the business of science 

 is not to keep up the courage of men, but to tell the truth. 

 .And biological science in the study still faces this 

 dilemma, that the individual in a non-combatant species, 

 if such a thing as a non-combatant species ever e.\ist, 

 a species, that is to say, perfectly adapted to static con- 

 ditions, is, by virtue of its perfect reactions, a mechanism, 

 and that in a species not in a state of equilibrium, a species 

 undergoing modification, a certain painful stress must 

 weigh upon all its imperfectly adapted indi\ iduals, and 

 death be busy among the most imperfect. And where your 

 animal is social, the stress is still upon the group of imper- 

 fect individuals constituting the imperfect herd or anthill, 

 or what not — they merely suffer by wholesale instead of by 

 retail. In brief, a static species is mechanical, an evolving 

 species suffering — no line of escape from that impasse has 

 as yet presented itself. The names of the sculptor who 

 carves out the new forms of life are, and so far as human 

 science goes at present they must ever be, Pain and Deatli. 

 And the phenomena of degeneration rob one of any 

 confidence that the new forms will be in any case or in 

 a majority of cases "higher" (by any standard except 

 present adaptation to circumstances) than the old. 



-Messrs. Geddes and Thomson have advanced nothing 

 to weaken these convictions, and their attitude is alto- 

 gether amazingly unscientific. Mr. Thomson talks of 

 the Gospel of the Resurrection and "that charming girl 

 Proserpina," and Baldur the Beautiful and Dornroschen, 

 and hammers away at the great god Pan, inviting all and 

 NO. 1348, VOL. 52] 



sundry to " light the Beltane fires " — apparently with the 

 dry truths of science — " and keep the Floralia," while Prof. 

 Geddes relies chiefly on Proserpine and the Alchemy of 

 Life for his literary effects. Intercalated among these 

 writings are amateurish short stories about spring, "de- 

 scriptive articles " of the High School Essay type, poetry 

 and illustrations such as we have already dealt with. In 

 this manner is the banner of the " Scots Renascence," 

 and " Bio-optimism " unfurled by these industrious in- 

 vestigators in biology. It will not appeal to science 

 students, but to that large and important class of the 

 community which trims its convictions to its amiable 

 sentiments, it may appear as a very desirable mitigation 

 of the rigour of, what Mr. Buchanan has very aptly 

 called, the Cafvinism of science. H. G. Wells. 



THE GLYPTODONT ORIGIN OF MAMMALS. 

 Studies in the Ez'olution of Animals. By E. Bona\ia, 

 M.D. (London : Constable, 1895.) 



IN his preface the author writes that : " Having com- 

 pleted the ' Flora of the Assyrian Monuments and 

 its Outcomes,' I was looking about for something to take 

 up next as a subject of study. In the furriers' windows I 

 was attracted by the leopard and tiger skins, which by 

 degrees became objects of interesting study and specula- 

 tion." In the true interests of zoology, it is to be 

 deplored that his attention was not attracted by some 

 other subject. 



The key-note to the startling theory propounded in 

 this volume is to be found in a sentence on page 131, 

 where it is stated that : " The Glyptodonts, or other 

 armoured animals of a similar nature, were the originals 

 from which all existing mammals, including marsupials, 

 descended." 



This astounding statement is largely based on the 

 belief that the rosettes on the skins of the jaguar and 

 leopard are the remnants of the rosette-sculpture on the 

 bony carapace of the glyptodonts, the author stating 

 (p. 124) that these markings '^'' 3.xe. inherited irom ancestral 

 plate-impressions of some extinct glyptodontoid form, 

 and have not been evolved by a process of natural 

 selection." 



How the author can conceive that the Felidie are de- 

 scended from any glyptodont-like form (by which it may 

 be presumed an edentate is meant) will pass the com- 

 prehension of any anatomical zoologist ; but all will 

 endorse his remark (p. 163) that "one would indeed 

 require to have lived a good bit of time to witness a 

 Glyptodon changing into a Jaguar." This, however, is 

 by no means all. Later on the author finds evidence of 

 glyptodont affinities in the bosses on the skin of 

 Rhinoceroses, and remarks (p. 217) that "the giant 

 armadillo has its hind feet ungulate, its hoofs are almost 

 exactly like those of the Malayan Tapir ; and in some 

 rhinoceroses the incisor teeth are wholly wanting, and 

 that part of the jaw is contracted, not unlike that of the 

 Glyptodon." If this means anything, it means that 

 rhinoceroses are evolved from a veritable edentate 

 glyptodont ; and it is thus a pity the author did not 

 enlighten us how the full dentition and claws of a jaguar 

 were also to be derived from such a type. 



It would be mere \vaste of space to state how mar- 



