292 
beneficial experience; no harder to cultivate 
bodily infirmity, or logical inconsequence, or 
mental imbecility, or moral obliquity, than to 
make the best of our faculties and opportunities. 
The naturalist must also ask whether the 
contented enjoyment of normal life may not 
afford better evidence of intention than fickle 
lack of stability. 
Those who are satisfied with the sort of 
natural theology which finds its type in filial 
affection, based upon gratitude rather than ex- 
pectations, may possibly find evidence for this 
sort of teleology in nature, without first settling 
the disputes of the philosophers about the rela- 
tion between mind and matter. 
The most obvious answer to reasoning like 
Ward’s is that we fail to find in nature any 
reason why all life, or, for that matter, all 
nature, may not come to an end this instant ; 
for the assertion that the stability of nature is 
necessary to our welfare means nothing more 
than that this stability is much desired by those 
who have found life worth living. 
If we are sure only of the present and of the 
past, and if science gives us nothing more than 
reasonable expectations about the future, which 
may or may not prove well founded, it is evi- 
dent that we must look to the present and to 
the past for evidence of purpose in nature if we 
are to find it in nature at all. 
They who are dissatisfied with this sort of 
purpose, and tell us it weighs upon them like a 
nightmare, must remember that there is no 
reason to doubt and good reason—as good rea- 
son as our own existence—to expect that the 
future will, on the whole, be essentially like the 
past; and that while the so-called predictions 
of science are no more than reasonable expec- 
tations they are reasonable expectations, since 
they are part of our nature as reasonable beings, 
as we have come about in accordance with the 
mechanical principle of natural selection. 
If I am sure that natural knowledge has been 
useful and profitable and delightful to me lam 
as utterly unable to see why the discovery of a 
mechanical equivalent for truth should affect 
this conviction as I am to see how the scientific 
study of the mechanism of digestion can de- 
stroy my conviction that food and drink have, 
on the whole, been good for me: as unable asI 
SCIENCE. 
[N. S. Vou. X. No. 244. 
am to see here proof that I do nothing which 
one who had exhaustive knowledge of any 
organic mechanism might have expected one to 
do, would prove that Iam not reasonable and 
responsible. It is true that I have suffered be- 
cause of my food, but I have never suffered 
from natural knowledge, and better knowledge 
of the mechanism of digestion might have helped 
me to avoid this suffering. 
So far as I understand the scientific frame of 
mind, and may be permitted to speak for the 
naturalist, he is neither a materialist nor an 
idealist nor an agnostic monist, although the 
‘ possible experience’ of the idealist seems to him 
to afford ample room for a physical universe as 
material as the most ardent materialist could de- 
sire. It also seems to him that if common 
folks are to refrain from a search for purpose in 
nature until the philosophers have settled all 
their little questions and have reached an agree- 
ment among themselves they had better aban- 
don all hope of finding the meaning of nature. 
Each new philosopher assures us that his only 
motive is to help us to reach the truth and to 
set our minds at rest, but it may be that while 
philosophers fall out the simple-minded men 
of science may come by their own and live at 
ease. W. K. Brooks. 
Jouns Hopkins UNIVERSITY. 
The Races of Europe. WILLIAM Z. RIPLEY. 
New York, D. Appleton & Co. 1899. Pp. 
xxxii+624. Accompanied by a Supplemen- 
tary Bibliography of the Anthropology and 
Ethnology of Europe, published by the Public 
Library of the City of Boston. Pp. x+160. 
The interesting series of articles on the phys- 
ical anthropology of Europe which Professor 
Ripley contributes to Appletons’ Popular Sci- 
ence Monthly has been published in a revised 
form under the above title, accompanied by a 
very full bibliography of the subject. The 
work is based on a study of the very extensive 
published and much unpublished material that 
has been collected in various parts of Kurope, 
and is an attempt at coordinating the results 
obtained by European investigators. The labor 
and the difficulties involved in a task of this 
kind are formidable, and the author deserves 
the thanks of all students for having made 
