718 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXII. No. 829 



heave up and down for a few seconds and then 

 burst into a fountain, which would shoot up 

 twenty or thirty feet, play a few seconds, and then 

 iall back into the lake below. A similar process 

 would go on at the same time in a nearby spot, 

 .and two fountains would invariably play within 

 a, few seconds of each other. Then, as they fell, 

 the crust would cool over the place that had been 

 so furiously active, and after a few minutes of 

 quiescence the same action would be repeated. 

 Two islands of lava stood unmelted in the north- 

 west side of the lake. We heard a furious hissing 

 and blowing on the southeast, but did not go that 

 way to examine. A tropic bird. Phaeton, came 

 sailing over the fire lake, paused a moment near 

 us, and flew away to the east. 



I took these bearings from Halemaumau: high- 

 est bluflts of ICilauea crater, N. 33° W.; flow of 

 1832, N. 65° E. We found some ti leaves (Dra- 

 cw-na) scattered about, evidences of recent visits; 

 left the place at about noon and returned by a 

 nearly straight course to the place of our descent 

 into the crater. The next morning, at 4:30, as 

 1 left Kilauea, the fires of Pele, sixty in number, 

 ■gleamed spectrally through a driving rain. 



This account, in spite of its imperfections, 

 ■shows, I think, that the activity at Kilauea in 

 July, 1855, ■was not to be reckoned as a true 

 eruption. The great dome of Halemaumau 

 disappeared a few months later, whether co- 

 incidently or not with the great eruption from 

 Mauna Loa, beginning in September, it would 

 "be interesting to know. That eruption, which 

 lasted fifteen months, threatening the village 

 and bay of Hilo, was fully and vividly de- 

 scribed, by my father, Titus Coan — " The 

 Bishop of the Volcano," as the Hawaiians 

 loved to call him. 



Titus Munson (Joan 



New Yobk City 



SCIENTIFIC BOOKS 



Der Begriff des Instiriktes einst und jetzt: 

 eine Studie uber die OescMchte und die 

 Grundlagen der Tierpsycliologie. Von Dr. 

 Heinrich Ernst Ziegler. Zweite, verbes- 

 serte und vermehrte Auflage. Mit einem 

 Anhang: Die Gehirne der Bienen und 

 Ameisen. Jena, Gustav Fischer. 1910. 

 Pp. vi -f 112. 

 The first edition of this monograph was 



published in the Weismann Festschrift (Zool- 



ogisclie Jahrliicher, Supplement VII., 1904). 

 In the present edition the historical sections 

 have been amplified, and account has been 

 taken of some of the more recent literature on 

 the subject. As no review of the first edition 

 seems to have appeared in this journal, it will 

 be best to discuss the essay as a whole. 



Its introductory sections, on the history of 

 the concept of instinct, bring out more clearly 

 than the reviewer remembers to have seen 

 done elsewhere, the fact that the opposition 

 bet'ween the tendency to humanize animals 

 and the tendency to regard them as separated 

 from man by an impassible gulf has been more 

 or less continuously evident through the whole 

 history of thought. Ziegler's own notion of 

 instinct is, as is well known, that of a thor- 

 ough-going Neo-Darwinian : the " inherited 

 habit " theory he emphatically rejects. To 

 the Lamarckianism of Semon's recent attempt 

 to make heredity a form of memory he objects 

 that heredity, as an affair of the single cell, 

 can have nothing in common with memory, 

 which demands a nervous system : this objec- 

 tion evidently involves a difference of defini- 

 tion. Ziegler offers nothing essentially new 

 on the question as to the distinguishing marks 

 of an instinctive action: it is action based on 

 inherited nervous connections. 



As for the problem of consciousness in ani- 

 mals, he declares it to be insoluble. Animal 

 psychology, he thinks, should not be based on 

 this problem. " This view is not in accord 

 with the opinion of those psychologists who 

 regard consciousness as the essential mark of 

 the psychic. Such psychologists are, however, 

 not in a position to further animal psychol- 

 ogy." Nevertheless, he has a good deal to say 

 on the insoluble problem. Where the nervous 

 system of an animal is very unlike that of 

 man, Ziegler thinks consciousness, even in the 

 form of pleasure and pain, very improbable. 

 He quotes from von Uexkiill Norman's ob-. 

 servation on the earthworm, the head end of 

 which, when the animal is cut in two, crawls 

 away undisturbed, -while the squirming move- 

 ments are confined to the hinder end. One 

 meets this observation so often serving as ac- 

 tual disproof of the existence of pain, indeed 



