266 



NA TURE 



[July 21, 1904 



ablv when he walked from Hinton to Derby, a distance 

 of more than one himdred miles, in three days almost 

 without food or sleep, and its manifestation in later life 

 is well illustrated by the statement that after the pro- 

 jection of the evolutionary system at the age of thirty- 

 seven, " nearly everything I wrote had a bearing, direct 

 or indirect, on the doctrine of evolution." 



Among the characters of direct importance to his 

 intellectual productiveness must be reckoned the 

 freedom and spontaneity of his ideational processes. 

 During boyhood trains of ideas were apt to occupy 

 his attention for long periods excluding all awareness 

 of his surroundings, and this seems to have been 

 esoecially frequent during walking. He speaks of 

 this free flow of ideas in boyhood as " castle-building," 

 but names it " constructive imagination " when, 

 in later life, owing to systematisation of interests, his 

 ideational processes tended towards ends related to his 

 general scheme of conceptions. This spontaneity of 

 the ideational processes enabled him to reach his con- 

 ceptions and conclusions with a minimum of voluntary 

 effort and, indeed, his efforts were more often directed 

 to the checking rather than, as with most of us, to 

 the promoting of the f^ow of thought. The following 

 passage describes this as well as another important 

 mental trait. 



" It has never been niv way to set before mvself a 

 problem and puzzle out an answer. The conclusions 

 at which I have from time to time arrived, have not 

 been arrived at as solutions of questions raised ; but 

 have been arrived at unawares — each as the ultimate 

 outcome of a body of thoughts which slowly grew 

 from a germ. Some direct observation, or some fact 

 met with in reading, would dwell with me : apparently 

 because I had a sense of its significance. It was not 

 that there arose a distinct consciousness of its general 

 m^anin"'; but rather that there was a kind of 

 instinctive interest in those facts which have general 

 meanings. For example, the detailed structure of this 

 or that species of mammal . . . would leave little im- 

 pression ; but when I met with the statement that, 

 almost without exception, mammals . . . have seven 

 cervical vertebrae, this would strike me and be remem- 

 b?red as suggestive." 



In this passage is indicated the last of the faculties 

 of primary importance, the faculty of seizing upon 

 facts or conceptions that were of significance for his 

 scheme of thought, well illustrated by his adoption 

 and extended application of von Baer's phrase " the 

 ■change from homogeneity to heterogeneity." It was 

 this subtle and ready working of selective attention that 

 rendered unnecessary the storing in the memory of 

 vast masses of facts, and enabled him to dispense 

 with any very extensive reading. Spencer's " sporadic 

 memory " was avowedly poor, and this fact, coO])er- 

 ating in youth with a constitutional idleness, a distaste 

 for continued reading and an impatience of opinions 

 with which he did not agree, and in later life cooper- 

 ating with an incapacity for reading dating from the 

 time of the writing of the " Psychology " (aet. 38), 

 very effectively preserved him from that " accumu- 

 lation of knowledge in excess of power to use it " 

 which he deplored as one of the common results of the 

 current educational methods and regarded as one of 

 the principal sources of intellectual sterility in many 

 NO. 181 2, VOL. 70] 



able men. It is an interesting question. How would 

 .Spencer's work have been modified had he devoted 

 much time and energy to reading in place of passing- 

 restlessly from place to place, unable to bear solitude,, 

 constantly seeking to kill time, as he tells us, by- 

 various trivial occupations? Would extensive reading- 

 have choked the springs of production? There cark 

 be no doubt that, had his mental digestion proved 

 equal to the task, a greater acquaintance with the 

 history of thought would have enabled him to raise 

 his works to a still higher level than that they actually 

 attained — to secure for them an even more solid and 

 enduring fame. 



Of the further qualities that especially contributed 

 to determine the character of his political and ethical 

 doctrines, we may note a love of freedom, a quick 

 sympathetic resentment of all injustice, a high valu- 

 ation of pleasure for its own sake. 



As to the general impression of the man produced 

 by this autobiography, it seems certain that it is unduly 

 harsh and unfavourable, for Spencer persisted with 

 almost painful honesty and in accordance with the 

 principle he had adopted, in laying stress upon the 

 distinctive or peculiar features, while neglecting those 

 more amiable traits which he shared with men in 

 general. The result is that, whereas most biographies,, 

 and even autobiographies, are of the nature of a 

 portrait, in which the artist selects an aspect and 

 idealises to some extent the features of the subject,, 

 this one resembles rather a harsh, crude photograph 

 that reproduces with relentless accuracy, and even 

 gives undue prominence to, the lines and the warts, 

 all the asperities of nature and all the bruises of the 

 battle of life. W. McD. 



\ 



AMERICAN BIG GAME. 

 Musk-Ox, Bison, Sheep, and Goat. By C. Whitney 



and others. American Sportsman's Library. Pp. 



284; illustrated. (New York: The Macmillan 



Co. ; London : Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1904.) 



Price Ss. 6d. net. 

 TJie Slill-Hunter. By T. S. Van Dyke. Pp. yiii + 



390; illustrated. (New York: The Macmillan Co.;. 



London : Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1904.) Price 



75. 6d. net. 



THE members of the deer tribe, together with the 

 pronghorned antelope, or prongbuck, having 

 been described in an earlier volume of the same series, 

 the work standing first in our list completes the account 

 of the wild ruminants of North America. The names 

 of the authors — Mr. C. Whitney for the musk-ox, Mr. 

 G. B. Grinnell for the bison, and Mr. O. Wister for 

 the mountain sheep and the white goat — form a 

 sufficient guarantee that the text of this volume will 

 combine that mixture of sport and natural history 

 for which the true sportsman always looks in works 

 of this nature, and a glance at its pages shows that 

 such is really the case. From title-page to index the 

 method of treatment and the style of writing are 

 admirable, so admirable, indeed, that there is scarcely 

 a sentence to which exception can be taken. 



One admirable feature is that all three authors have 



