February i, 1894] 



NA TURE 



311 



The essay on animal automatism was delivered as an 

 evening address at the meeting of the British Associ- 

 ation at Belfast, when Tyndall was president. It was a 

 truly marvellous performance, for it occupied nearly an 

 hour and a half, and was delivered with an appearance of 

 complete spontaneity and ease in the very words which 

 are here printed, without a note or reference of any kind, 

 by a man who, when he first attempted it, " disliked 

 public speaking " and, as he tells us, had a firm con- 

 viction that he should break down every time he opened 

 his mouth. To some readers, as to myself, the short 

 *' autobiography," with which the volume commences, 

 will be new, and owing to its charming frankness and 

 graceful reticence the most delightful chapter in it. Prof. 

 Huxley, doubtless for good reasons, does not tell us where 

 and under what circumstances each of these essays first 

 saw the light, but the autobiography was apparently 

 published with a photograph not many years ago. It is 

 full of good things. The author confesses to having 

 inherited from his father, as well as an inborn faculty for 

 drawing, " a hot temper, and that amount of tenacity of 

 purpose which unfriendly observers sometimes call 

 obstinacy.'' He remembers preaching to his mother's 

 maids intht kitchen, with his pinafore turned wrong side 

 forwards in order to represent a surplice—" the earliest 

 indication I can call to mind of the strong clerical affini- 

 ties which my friend Mr. Herbert Spencer has always 

 ascribed to me ! " Of his schoolmasters he has nothing 

 good to say — they " cared about as much for our intel- 

 lectual and moral welfare as if they were baby-farmers." 

 His great desire on leaving school was to be a mechanical 

 engineer ; but the fates were against this, and he com- 

 menced the study of medicine. 



It is very interesting to those who know the value and 

 range of his original researches in comparative anatomy 

 to read the statement — 



" I am afraid there is very little of the genuine natur- 

 alist about me. I never collected anything, and species 

 work was always a burden to me ; what I cared for was 

 the architectural and engineering part of the business, 

 the working out the wonderful unity of plan in the thou- 

 sands and thousands of diverse living constructions and 

 the modifications of similar apparatuses to serve diverse 

 ends." 



I venture to think that it is not only as a mechanical 

 engineer in par it bus infidelium, as he says of himself, 

 that Prof Huxley has dealt with organic form, but also as 

 an artist, a born lover of form, a character which others 

 recognise in him though he does not himself set it down 

 in his analysis. 



Some day, it is to be hoped, Prof. Huxley will fill 

 in the outlines of this autobiography, and especially give 

 us an account of those long years of arduous work, of 

 discoveries, struggles, triumphs, and friendships from the 

 time when he succeeded his friend Edward Forbes in 

 1854 to the present day. 



No better introduction can be given to Prof. Huxley's 

 collected essays than his own statement of the objects 

 which he has had in view during the years in which, 

 whilst producing also educational books and many 

 larger and strictly scientific works addressed to the 

 limited circle of biological experts, he has by these 

 occasional addresses and articles taught a vast number 

 NO. I 266, VOL. 49] 



of his fellow-countrymen the value of scientific ways of 

 thinking, and freed them from the fetters of orthodox 

 superstition. These objects have been, he says — 



" To promote the increase of natural knowledge and to 

 forward the application of scientific methods of investi- 

 gation to all the problems of life to the best of my ability, 

 in the conviction which has grown with my growth and 

 strengthened with my strength that there is no alleviation 

 for the sufferings of mankind except veracity of thought 

 and of action, and the resolute facing of the world as it 

 is when the garment of make-believe by which pious 

 hands have hidden its uglier features is stripped off. It 

 is with this intent that I have subordinated any reason- 

 able, or unreasonable, ambition for scientific fame, which 

 I may have permitted myself to entertain, to other ends ; 

 to the popularisation of science ; to the development and 

 organisation of scientific education ; to the endless series 

 of battles and skirmishes over evolution ; and to untiring 

 opposition to that ecclesiastical spirit, that clericalism, 

 which in England, as everywhere else, and to whatever 

 denomination it may belong, is the deadly enemy of 

 science. In striving for the attainment of these objects, 

 I have been but one among many, and I shall be well 

 content to be remembered, or even not remembered, as 

 such." E. Ray Lankester. 



A 



THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TO-DAY. 



G^'undziigc der PJiysiologischen Psychologie. Von 



Wilhelm Wundt. 4te Auflage. (Leipzig: Wm. Engel- 



mann, 1893.) 



NEW edition of this well-known work will be 

 welcomed by all interested in this developing 

 branch of science, and the author is to be congratulated 

 on the fact that a work of this magnitude should reach 

 its fourth edition in nineteen years. 



The general plan of the work and the general opinions 

 are unaltered, but there has been much revision and 

 addition of detail throughout. The most extensive altera- 

 tion consists in the much more detailed description of 

 experimental methods, especially in the chapters on the 

 intensity of sensation, and on Time problems. The 

 descriptions are admirably clear, and their value is 

 greatly increased by the addition of numerous woodcuts 

 illustrating the apparatus employed. 



In the first half of the book, which deals with the 

 anatomy and physiology of the nervous system, one 

 turns with interest to learn what the author has to say on 

 the subject of cerebral locahsation. Wundt opposes the 

 notion that the physiological substrata of complex mental 

 processes can be localised in a limited area of the brain, 

 though he appears later to disregard this when he 

 suggests that his process of apperception is localised in 

 the prajfrontal lobes. While accepting, however, the 

 localisation of motor and sensory processes in a more or 

 lessgeneral way, he hesitates to accept that definitelocalisa- 

 tion which the facts now at our disposal seem to justify, ai 

 any rate so far as concerns the so-called motor area. His 

 attitude on this question is influenced by the fact that he 

 regards the prevailing view as an outgrowth from the 

 doctrine of specific nerve energy, of which he is a deter- 

 mined opponent. One of his chief arguments is derived 

 from the phenomena of compensation when a part of the 

 brain has been destroyed. Wundt's view of this process 

 is that the functions of the destroyed part are taken on 



