420 
families have a comparatively uniform en- 
vironment, but different races necessarily 
carry with them each to some extent its own 
peculiar miliew We can not in our present 
knowledge assert how far this goes. Certainly 
races and indeed nations can be at least tem- 
porarily modified by an education and train- 
ing imposed in the interests of, and by the will 
of, a very few persons, as for instance, Ger- 
many during the last half century. 
This factor of leadership in the rise and de- 
cline of races is generally overlooked by: Mr. 
Grant, as is the problem of the formation of 
upper classes. Mr. Grant fears that the Nordic 
race is passing away. There is much to be 
said in substantiation for this unpleasing 
prospect, and if there is much to be said, cer- 
tainly Mr. Grant has said it. The present re- 
viewer does not take such a gloomy view. 
There are internal forces silently and continu- 
ously working towards the improvement, not 
of the whole race, but of a part of it, and this 
part tends further to improve with its own im- 
provement. Some of the tendencies or corre- 
lations working towards melioration are assor- 
tative mating (7. e., tendency of like to mate 
with like), general truth as far as results at 
present indicate of desirable traits within an 
individual to be correlated with other desir- 
able traits, general tendency of long-lived peo- 
ple with a tough resistance to leave more off- 
spring than the average, besides other recently 
discovered correlations bringing an encourag- 
ing outlook. 
There are some of the phases of human evo- 
lution that ought to be more generally recog- 
nized and incorporated into all discussions on 
the rise and decline of races and of nations. 
In spite of such criticism, “ The Passing of 
the Great Race” is an interesting and valv- 
able pioneer attempt at an interpretation of 
history in terms of race. The origins and mi- 
grations of the three primary European races, 
Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean, are here 
instructively and graphically portrayed. The 
colored charts make it easy to grasp the out- 
lines of the author’s theory. This is a book 
that will do much to widen the rapidly ex- 
panding interest in eugenics and help to dis- 
SCIENCE 
[N. S. Vou. XLVIII. No. 1243 
seminate the ever-growing conviction among 
scientific men of the supreme importance of 
heredity. Freperick ADAMS Woops 
War Bread. By Atonzo E. Taytor. New 
York, The Macmillan Co. 1918. 
Almost since the outbreak of the war Dr. 
Taylor has been engaged in the study of the 
food problem, at first in Germany in the in- 
terest of British prisoners in German camps, 
then in Holland, making a survey of Dutch 
food resources, and he has later served as cnief 
scientific adviser of the Food Administration 
of Washington and has made frequent trips to 
Europe. This little book, presenting as it 
does the cereal situation of the Allied coun- 
tries in the spring of 1918, bids fair to become 
a classic. Reading it, one can realize how a 
fortunate wheat crop this year will allow us to 
send wheat to Europe directly without involv- 
ing the increased number of ships necessary 
to transport it from far-away Australia or the 
Argentine. The book clearly shows how fail- 
ure to conserve wheat plays into the hands of 
the enemy and tells of the methods employed 
for its conservation. GraHam Lusk 
A STUDY OF ENGINEERING EDUCA- 
TION 
Tue Carnegie Foundation for the Advance- 
ment of Teaching has just issued its Eleventh 
Bulletin, A study of Engineering Education, 
which has been in process of development dur- 
ing the past four years in cooperation with the 
joint committee on engineering education of 
the national engineering societies. 
Engineering education was established on a 
large scale only fifty years ago on the basis of 
the experience of foreign countries, particu- 
larly France. Since then, applied science has 
made marvelous progress, and in order to meet 
that progress, the original curricula of the 
schools have been modified here and there and 
from time to time in a haphazard way. The 
result is that modern engineering curricula 
lack coherence and unity and have for a num- 
ber of years been the object of criticism by the 
engineering profession. 
