296 



NA TURE 



[January 29, 1903 



LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 



( The Editor does not hold himself responsible for opinions ex- 

 pressed by his correspondents. Neither can he undertake 

 to return, or to correspond with the writers of, rejected 

 manuscripts intended for this or any other part of Nature. 

 No notice is taken of anonymous communications.] 



Genius and the Struggle for Existence. 



Will you allow me to supplement the excellent reply of Sir 

 Oliver Lodge to your correspondent Mr. G. W. Bulman by a 

 few remarks dealing more specifically with that gentleman's 

 difficulty, which is one very widely felt, but is, I believe, 

 founded on a misconception? 



The words "useful" and "advantage" have two distinct 

 meanings, the one referring to material the other to intellectual 

 and moral results ; and it is in the former sense only that they 

 can be properly used in relation to natural selection or survival 

 of the fittest. In that relation, physical results only are of 

 value — those that tend to the preservation of life on occasions 

 of stress and danger. In deciding whether any quality, physical 

 or mental, is of value in this sense, Lloyd Morgan's admirable 

 test should be applied — " Is it of survival-value?" If not, then 

 it is not useful in the struggle for existence either to the in- 

 dividual or the race, unless it happens to be combined with 

 other qualities which are, in an exceptional degree, of survival 

 value. Now genius in all its varying manifestations is a quality 

 which has hardly any relation to survival except an adverse one, 

 and only in exceptional cases is of any material advantage 

 to the race. The genius of the poet, ot the writer, of the 

 artist, even of the inventor, only occasionally benefits the race 

 in its material struggle with other races, while it very rarely 

 gives long life and an ample progeny to the possessor. Its use 

 to him is solely the enjoyment of the exercise of his faculty of 

 creating. Too frequently it is of no material use whatever to 

 him, and he dies in poverty and neglect. The two races that 

 have exhibited the highest manifestations of genius were the 

 ancient Greeks and the Jews. But this genius did not advantage 

 their respective races in the struggle for existence. Both of 

 them became permanently subject races, and that they have 

 survived at all is not due to their genius, but to their excep- 

 tionally fine physical qualities, their courage and their 

 endurance. 



As a matter of fact, the law of the survival of the fittest has 

 almost entirely ceased to apply to civilised man, and the 

 more civilised he is the less it .applies. I ^have already shown 

 (in the chapter on " Human Selection " in my " Studies "), how, 

 under a higher civilisation and a truer social system, it will be 

 superseded by another law, which maybe termed " the perpetu- 

 ation of the fittest," and which will operate as automatically and 

 as beneficially in improving the human race as natural selection 

 has acted in improving the lower animals. At present, as 

 Darwin himself fully recognised, it is not the best or the highest 

 that survive, but a comparatively low type morally and 

 intellectually, though in relation to our present very imperfect 

 civilisation they may be held to be the fittest. It is, however, 

 ■fitness to " succeed in life," as it is termed, not necessarily to 

 survive ; and this is indicated by the comparatively short lives 

 of millionaires and of the inhabitants of cities, who are continu- 

 ally replaced by the sons of the less successful but more virile 

 inhabitants of the rural districts. Alfred R. Wallace. 



The Holy Shroud. 



Prof. Meldola's notice from a truly scientific standpoint of 

 Dr. Vignon's book, entitled " The Shroud of Christ," is not less 

 interesting than valuable, but I think two difficulties which 

 hardly fell within the scope of his article may also be raised. 

 One struck me at once in examining the facsimile of the photo- 

 graphic negative plate of the Holy Shroud (facing p. 17). The 

 body had been lying, of course, face upwards. I presume that if 

 a corpse were thus placed on a stone slab, within a very few 

 hours of death, the nates would be slightly flattened by pres- 

 sure, but their normal roundness — as in a nude standing figure — 

 caught my eye at once when examining the plate. 



But a still more serious difficulty awaits Dr. Vignon. The 

 «hroud in shape has a general resemblance to an elongated 

 bath-towel ; on one half, smoothed out, the body was laid, 

 and the other was neatly doubled over the head and 

 brought down so as completely to cover the feet. This mode 



NO. 1735, VOL. 67] 



of burial, so far as I know, was not usual among the Jews 

 at that date (the corpse being more or less wrapped up, 

 as described in the raising of Lazarus). But passing over 

 this point, for Dr. Vignon pleads that the arrangement was 

 a temporary one (though, by the -way, it would make the pre- 

 servative myrrh and aloes much less effective), we find the 

 authors of the four Gospels all use language which excludes 

 any such arrangement of the so-called shroud. Matthew and 

 Luke both write evervKi&v atirb Iv <rivS6vt ; Mark in a nearly 

 identical sentence substitutes the verb eVeiATiffev. But both 

 these words mean to wrap or to roll up, not to lay a sheet 

 over (and under). John, in a rather more minute description, 

 says, (^r]a<xv aurb e'e odoviots fj.era twv apcvfxaTup, adding " as is 

 the custom of the Jews in burial." He also mentions bandages 

 or body-cloths a second time, and a napkin bound about the 

 head — which would have interfered with the photographic 

 process. Dr. Vignon endeavours to elude the plain meaning 

 of these passages, but, as it seems to me, he can only prove 

 the genuineness of the shroud by rejecting the four principal 

 witnesses to the facts of which it is supposed to be a record, a 

 process which has a suspicious resemblance to sawing oft the 

 branch on which you are sitting. T. G. Bonney. 



The Herbarium of Ferrante Imperato at Naples. 



In a recent issue of Nature (vol. lxvii. p. 181), there is an 

 account of a paper by Prof. B. Schorler on a history of sys- 

 tematic botany prior to Linmeus. In the list given of the most 

 ancient existing herbaria, no mention is made of that of Fer- 

 rante Imperato, which is among the oldest extant. This 

 ancient herbarium, the remains of which are preserved in the 

 National Library of Naples, is also overlooked in the interesting 

 paper, now in course of publication, in the Magyar Botanikai 

 Lapok (Budapest, 1902), by Alfoldi Flatt Karoly, "ZurGes- 

 chichte der Herbare. " 



An incidental notice of the herbarium of Ferrante Imperato 

 was published by me in Nature (vol. lxiii., November, 1900) 

 in an article on Domenico Cirillo and the chemical action of 

 light, in connection with vegetable irritability. 



Ferrante Imperato, a Neapolitan simplicista, born in 15 50, 

 lived in Naples, where he died in 1625. In those days, museums 

 of natural history began to be formed in Italy, the most famous 

 being those of Aldovrandi in Bologna, the museum of Pisa, 

 where Andrea Cesalpino (1519-1603) taught, and the museum 

 of Ferrante Imperato in Naples. In Ferrante's book, " Dell' 

 Historia Naturale, Libri XXVIII.," edited by his son, Fran- 

 cesco Imperato, in 1599, is given a picture of the museum at 

 Naples. This museum, as the author says, contained " Natural 

 plants artificially preserved, attached to the pages of special 

 books, and besides, terrestrial, aquatic and flying animals : 

 moreover, gems, marbles and divers stones, earths, minerals 

 and metals, and preserved seeds and rare leaves, and extracts 

 of divers earths and plants." 



At the end of the sixteenth century, a Genoese nobleman, 

 Giovanni Vincenzo Pinelli, formed in Naples a botanical 

 garden or " Orto dei Semplici," in which many rare plants 

 were collected under the care of Bartolomeo Maranta, of Venosa 

 (who died in 1570), Ferrante Imperato and Fabio Colonna 

 (1567-1650), an active correspondence and exchange of materials 

 being kept up with other collectors. As Imperato puts it in 

 his book, "human sciences grow by communion among men ; 

 this do I say and confess because our studies and the matters of 

 which we write have developed by the help of friends who 

 have concurred in procuring for us things from divers parts of 

 the world, or have been companions and fellow-labourers. ' 

 Besides G. V. Pinelli, the chief helper in collecting foreign 

 objects, and Maranta and Fabio Colonna, who lived in Naples, 

 ImperaLO records among his correspondents Pietro Andrea 

 Mattioli, of Siena (1500-1577), Melchiorre Guilandini, of 

 Padua (1520-1589), Jacopo Cortuso, also of Padua (1513-1603), 

 Ulisse Aldovrandi, of Bologna (1522-1605), Carlo Clusio, 

 Kaspar Bauhin, of Bale (1560-1624), and Colantonio Stelliola, 

 " Professor of Recondite Sciences, to whom I have communi- 

 cated the greater part of the discoveries made by me." One 

 does not understand why some authors attribute the work of 

 Imperato to this Stelliola. 



The herbarium was perhaps the more important part of this 

 Neapolitan museum, being contained in eighty volumes. The 

 museum of Imperato got dispersed during the great plague of 

 Naples in 1656, and only nine out of the eighty volumes of the 



