January 14, 1909] 



NA TURE 



303 



dicating the gradual trend of opinion towards a large 

 substitution of the Miillerian interpretation for that 

 of Bates. 



A word must be added on a subject of some 

 delicacy. Prof. Poulton's introduction, in which he 

 deafs with certain of the assertions and pretensions 

 of the English school of Mendelians, is undeniably 

 controversial, and even in places personal. The 

 author has in several quarters been taken to task for 

 his polemics. This reminds us of the old com- 

 plaint : — 



Cet animal est tr^s mechant ; 

 Ouand on I'attaquc, il sc defend ! 



Controversy is necessary for the progress of science. 

 Personalities, we think, are, as a rule, better avoided ; 

 but there are cases when the tone adopted by the 

 assailant makes it impossible to offer an effective 

 resistance except by the employment of methods 

 which would at ordinary times be left unused. Prof. 

 Poulton shows that he warmly appreciates the interest 

 and value of Mendel's discovery, and the keenness 

 and industry with which it is being followed up, but 

 we think that he is justified in his protest against 

 an attitude necessarily tending to discourage the 

 younger workers in a field which, since the ground 

 was first broken by the great naturalists lately com- 

 memorated and honoured, has proved the most fertile 

 of all within the wide realm of the sciences of life. 



The book is fitly dedicated to Prof. Meldola, to 

 whom all Darwinians owe an immense debt of grati- 

 tude. It is furnished with an admirable index, and 

 both paper and printing are worthy of the traditions 

 of the Clarendon Press. F. A. D. 



ARCHAEOLOGY IN GREECE. 



The Annual of the British School at Atliens. 

 No. XIII., Session 1906-7. Pp. .\i + 488 + plates. 

 (London : Macmillan and Co., Ltd., n.d.) Price 

 25^. net. 



IN this volume of the " Annual " the director and 

 students of the British School at Athens describe 

 the excavations at Sparta during the year 1907. The 

 work at the temple of .\rtemis Orthia was carried on 

 very successfully, and the results are most important 

 for our knowledge of Laconian art of the early period 

 (eighth to sixth centuries B.C.). Taking all in all, the 

 early .Spartans seem to have been much more 

 civilised than one would have expected; and if, as is 

 supposed by Mr. Droop, the so-called Cyrenaic style 

 of vase-painting is really Spartan, they seem to have 

 been originative artists. 



The temple of .Athena of the Brazen House, where, 

 as we read in all our Greek histories, the renegade 

 victor of Plataea, Pausanias the king, was walled up 

 and died miserably, has also been excavated, with 

 interesting results. We do not note that any par- 

 ticular conclusions as to possible date of foundation, 

 &c., are drawn from the orientation of these build- 

 ings. 



The two most interesting articles other than these 

 .'ire the continuations of Mr. Dickins's very 

 able critical article on the sculptor Damophon of 

 \0. 2046, VOL. 79] 



Messene, and of Dr. Mackenzie's on Cretan Palaces. 

 Dr. Mackenzie now completes his argument against 

 Prof. Ridgeway on the one side and Prof. Doerpfeld on 

 the other as to the precise signification of the great 

 discoveries in Crete. He is doubtless right against 

 Prof. Ridgeway in maintaining that the people who 

 built the palaces of Knossos and Phaistos were not 

 Indo-Europeans, and did not speak any kind of Greek, 

 and against Doerpfeld in denying that they had any 

 .Achsan blood, or that their work shows any Achaean 

 influence. In fact, the Achaean theory was knocked 

 on the head by Prof. Ridgeway's trenchant criticism 

 in his " Early .Age of Greece," and Prof. Doerpfeld's 

 Achjeanised Carians have been knocked on the head 

 by Dr. Mackenzie. 



The " Minoans " may have been akin to the 

 Carians, but not to the Achaeans, who were Aryan 

 Greeks, which the Carians, Lycians, and others were 

 not. Where Prof. Ridgeway went wrong was in mak- 

 ing his " Pelasgians " ( = Minoans) Aryans. Whether 

 the Minoans were Pelasgians or not we cannot say; 

 Prof. J. L. Myres has lately shown how very useless 

 for practical purposes this elusive ethnic name is. 

 Prof. Ridgeway made the Pelasgi a pre-.Achaean wave 

 of .Aryan invaders. But if so, they cannot have been the 

 builders of the Cretan palaces, who came from the 

 south, not from the north. Dr. Mackenzie makes 

 them non-Aryan like the Minoans, but thinks that, 

 driven from Greece by the Aryan Achaeans, they fell 

 back upon their Minoan kinsmen in the islands and 

 Crete, and overthrew the Minoan culture, building 

 amid the ruins of the labyrinthine Minoan palaces 

 their own halls of the Mycenaean and Tirynthian type, 

 which we have hitherto regarded as Achaean. Thus 

 the Minoans would be pre-Pelasgic as well as pre- 

 Achaean. Dr. Mackenzie regards the well-known 

 " Warrior Vase " from Mycenae as Achaean, no doubt 

 correctly, and the geometric pottery of the Dipylon as 

 Dorian, a view which, altlijough it was generally 

 accepted a few years ago, has its difficulties. Per- 

 haps it was Achaean too. If it was Dorian, why is it 

 found in Attica? Are we to suppose that the 

 Athenians of set purpose deleted from their history 

 the fact that their land had at one time been Dorized? 



H. R. Hall. 



SYLVESTER'S MATHEMATICAL PAPERS. 

 The Collected Mathematical Papers of ]ann's Joseph 

 ■ Sylvester. Vol. ii. (1854-73). Pp. xvi + 732. 



(Cambridge : University Press, 1908.) Price i8s. 



net. 



AMONG the no papers contained in this volume 

 there are five or six which represent the author 

 at his best. First of all there are three on Newton's 

 rule for the discovery of imaginary roots of equations ; 

 here we see Sylvester working his way from a 

 laborious and partly tentative method to the simple 

 and beautiful proof which is reproduced in Tod- 

 hunter's "Theory of Equations." (It is not impos- 

 sible, by the bye, that there may be a series of cubic 

 functions of the coefficients which would give in- 

 formation supplementary to that afforded by Newton's 



