088 
this determination is, I believe, one of the 
foremost, if not the foremost problem that 
confronts the behaviorist of to-day, regardless 
as to whether he is vitalistically, mechanistic- 
ally or agnostically inclined. This problem 
may never be solved. The extent to which 
reactions are determined by material config- 
urations will probably never be precisely ascer- 
tained. But our knowledge concerning this 
can certainly be greatly extended. Our ob- 
servations and experiments have thus far been 
largely qualitative. Indeed, we have as yet 
searcely begun to apply quantitative methods. 
In this direction there stretches out before us 
a vast unknown region full of great promises 
and enticing possibilities. S. O. Mast 
ZOOLOGICAL LABORATORY, 
THE JOHNS HoPpKINS UNIVERSITY 
GEORGE JENNINGS HINDE 
On the eighteenth of last March Dr. George 
Jennings Hinde, F.R.S., F.G.S., died, at the 
age of seventy-nine. No doubt in time some 
friend or associate of his will write a personal 
tribute to the man and his work; I can but 
speak as one who knew him through his pub- 
lished researches, and it is to these that I 
would call attention in this brief appreciation. 
Hinde was a man who saw nature through 
a microscope. His life was devoted to the 
study of minute organic remains so that, as 
he said of himself, when other paleontologists 
went into the field armed with hammer and 
chisel to collect large specimens, he took with 
him only a magnifying lens. 
In the early seventies Hinde, having com- 
pleted his preliminary education in England, 
came to Canada where he spent seven years at 
the University of Toronto under Professor H. 
A. Nicholson. During that period his re- 
searches were more primarily geological than 
paleontological, his most important contribu- 
tions dealing with glacial phenomena in west- 
ern Canada, the glacial and inter-glacial 
strata of Scarboro Heights and other localities 
near Toronto, and the terraces of Lake On- 
tario. But while studying these broader geo- 
logical problems he was already turning his 
attention to the well-nigh invisible contents of 
SCIENCE 
[N. S. Von. XLVIII. No. 1250 
the rocks. Near Toronto he discovered in the 
Ordovicie strata conodonts and annelid jaws, 
while in the Devonic of Eighteen Mile Creek, 
near Buffalo, New York, he discovered the now 
famous Conodont bed. Later he found similar 
annelid remains in the Siluric of western Eng- 
land and in the Lower Carboniferous rocks of 
Scotland. 
Shortly after his return to England, he set 
out for what was then the paleontological 
Mecca of HKurope—the University of Munich. 
Karl A. von Zittel had been called to the chair 
of paleontology at Munich in the early seven- 
ties and in less than a decade his fame as a 
teacher and original investigator had spread 
throughout the world. His first major contri- 
bution to science was his monograph on fossil 
sponges which appeared between the years 
1878 and 1880. In this he laid the foundations 
of the science of paleospongiology, for he in- 
troduced the method of microscopic study of 
the spicules and skeletal structure, a method 
which had previously been deemed of no value 
for fossil forms although it was used for recent 
sponges. Furthermore, on the basis of these 
microscopic observations, he made a new 
classification of the whole phylum, redefined 
the old genera and described a large number 
of new ones, covering in this way the whole 
field of fossil sponges, and, finally, he gave an 
excellent series of illustrations of the ‘spicules, 
a thing which had not been done before. 
It was during. this very period, when Zittel 
was annually publishing contributions on the 
structure and classification of sponges, that 
Hinde went to Munich where he rather natu- 
rally undertook, for his doctorate dissertation, 
a piece of work along the lines then being pur- 
sued so eagerly at that university. He had 
brought with him from England a small 
nodule from the Chalk of Horstead, in Nor- 
folk, and this supplied him with material for 
his thesis, for, although the nodule measured 
only about a foot in diameter, it was found to 
contain thirty-eight species of sponges, all rep- 
resented by spicules. These species, many of 
them new, were described and figured by Hinde 
in a paper published in 1880, entitled “ Fossil 
Sponge Spicules from the Upper Chalk.” 
