Mabch 28, 1913] 



SCIENCE 



489 



nificance in all known or available forms of 

 these creatures. Even to such a study the 

 Cambrian brachiopods cut a very modest fig- 

 ure in paleontology. Specimens were few, 

 their structures were obscure, and hence their 

 relations were difficult to interpret; most of 

 the available material was poorly preserved 

 and, as a whole, they played a dubious role in 

 the generic history of the entire class as well 

 as in the total of the Cambrian fauna. 



In this new book the student may scan 104 

 crowded plates of the Cambrian Brachiopods, 

 bearing from 3,000 to 4,000 figures, and after 

 the first bewilderment has passed, he comes to 

 the realization that at last a definite progress 

 has been made in the census, the analysis and 

 estimate of the morphology and biologic worth 

 of these early and hence most significant or- 

 ganisms. 



The columns of Science are hardly the place 

 for a critical study of Dr. Walcott's results or 

 a measurement of their advance over previous 

 knowledge. The author's publications on vari- 

 ous aspects of the Cambrian fauna have been 

 as startling as rifle shots and as efFective in 

 opening our eyes to the unexpected develop- 

 ment of life within this field. With this book 

 before us, inherited and acquired notions of 

 the paucity of life in this " primordial " age 

 of the earth are forever swept aside. The 

 present panorama of the Cambrian Brachio- 

 pod fauna is simple in aspect but numerically 

 comparable to the brachiopod element in any 

 later geological age. At any rate here are 

 listed about six hundred species and only the 

 census taker for the class would dare say how 

 far any single subsequent period has over- 

 passed that number. As against their suc- 

 cessors in the later rocks they lack in diver- 

 sity of expression, for these are simple, sturdy, 

 coherent types, largely devoid of the sudden 

 and fugitive variations which accompany the 

 tachygenic, arrested and declining stages in 

 succeeding faunas. The author had the cour- 

 age, years ago, to break the restraints of geog- 

 raphy and polities and to content himself with 

 nothing less than the earth for his field. 

 Above a thousand localities are cited in his 

 lists here and it is the Cambrian terrane of the 



world which the author has been enabled to 

 reach through many direct and indirect 

 avenues; yet the substantial basis of the work 

 is his own discoveries in regions of his own 

 exploiting. 



It is probably not the proper business of a 

 notice of this work to analyze the part it has 

 played in the ecology of the author, but the 

 author is, for the moment, impersonal as is 

 any author who may have achieved so tre- 

 mendous an addition to the details of scien- 

 tific fact. These kernels of knowledge are not 

 easy to assimilate, they seem to go hard with 

 even the spiritually minded seeker after all 

 truth, and one may be disposed to wonder if 

 the joy of discovery, the sense of contribu- 

 tion, the rebound of satisfaction which comes 

 with each new determination of fact, is not 

 the great reward in such achievement. But 

 here let us go slowly. If the whole truth 

 were to be known and the real underlying 

 genius of life could be indisputably portrayed, 

 I presume the difference between Lingulella 

 cuneola and Lingulella desiderata might 

 prove to be as vital in the Grand Plan and to 

 the Sum of Happiness, as the winning or los- 

 ing of a congressional appropriation for a mu- 

 seum of industry, Nevertheless, no man can 

 be so deeply conscious of the worth of such a 

 work as the man who did it; no one can ap- 

 preciate so well the broader bearings of such 

 a monumental increase of human knowledge. 

 Fortunately it is not of the sort that has to be 

 applied to meet human expediencies. Hence 

 its glorious justification. 



The greater volume of the text of this work 

 is given over to the descriptions of the spe- 

 cies, but there are preliminary chapters of 

 broader scope, among them none more sugges- 

 tive than the analysis of differential shell 

 structures. Following Beecher's broader 

 classification of the brachiopods, based on the 

 characters of the pedicle passage, Atremata, 

 Neotremata and Protremata (the first and 

 second corresponding to Huxley's Inarticu- 

 lata, and the third to the Articulaia) the ma- 

 jority of species and genera are Atremata, 

 and they, with the Neotremata, are as much 

 in excess of the rest here as they are over- 



