956 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. VIII. No. 209. 



icised by Mr. Bather is very rare, if not en- 

 tirely nou-existeut. In a tolerably active and 

 rather long experience I have never known of 

 an instance of the sort he mentions. Of course, 

 there may be such, but in the lines I am familiar 

 with I have never come across one. 



Of far more practical importance to workere 

 are the concealment by Societies of the true 

 date of issue of their publications and the false 

 dates of some well-known periodicals. Glaring 

 instances of this unscientific procedure will oc- 

 cur to everybody. This is an evil which the 

 committee would be generally supported in de- 

 nouncing. Every issue of a periodical, or, bet- 

 ter, every signature, should have the actual 

 date of printing upon it. When this is delayed 

 until a whole volume is printed the possessor of 

 an extract is left in the lurch. The dating would 

 cost nothing to the Societies and would often 

 save the isolated worker hours of weary 

 labor. 



Wm. H. Dall.> 



Smithsonian Institution, December 21, 1898. 



LEHMAN AND HANSEN ' ON THE TELEPATHIC 

 PBOBLEM. ' 



To THE Editor of Science : Professor 

 Titchener in to-day's Science assumes that 

 Messrs. Lehman and Hansen have performed 

 a work of definitive demolition in the well- 

 meant article of theirs to which he refers. If 

 he will take the pains to read Professor Sidg- 

 wick's criticism of their results in the S. P. R. 

 Proceedings, Vol. XII., p. 298, as well as the 

 note to my report of his paper in the Psycho- 

 logical Review, Vol. IV., p. 654, he will probably 

 admit that, owing to the fewness of the data 

 which they collected, they entirely failed to 

 prove their point. This leaves the phenomena 

 in dispute still hanging, and awaiting a positive 

 interpretation from other hands. 



I think that an exploded document ought not 

 to be left with the last word, even for the sake 

 of 'scientific psychology.' And I must inci- 

 dentally thank Professor Titchener for his ad- 

 mission that ' aloofness, however authoritative ' 

 (which phrase seems to be style noble for ' ig- 

 norance of the subject, and be d — d to it '), is an 

 attitude which need not be invariably main- 

 tained by the ' Scientific,' even towards matters 



such as this. I only wish that his admission 

 were a little less apologetic in form. 



Cambridge, Mass., William James. 



December 23, 1898. 



SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE. 

 Footnotes to Evolution. A series of popular ad- 

 dresses on the evolution of life. By David 

 Starr Jordan, Ph.D., President of Leland 

 Stanford Junior University. With supple- 

 mentary essays by Edwin Grant Conklin, 

 Ph.D.; Frank Mace McFarland, Ph.D.; 

 James Perrin Smith. New York, D. Ap- 

 pileton & Co. 1898. Price, $1.50. 

 Although the title of this book does not seem 

 entirely self-explanatory or expressive, the lay 

 reader will gain from a perusal of the volume 

 a clear idea of what evolution means. He will 

 also realize that what has been worked out 

 in the world of animal life applies equally well 

 in the main to man himself. Though man is an 

 animal he is much more, and problems of ex- 

 istence arise in the social, moral and spiritual 

 realms which are ciuite foreign to the subjects 

 investigated by the zoologist only. 



Dr. Jordan himself discusses, in a homely 

 but clear and attractive and at times pithy and 

 telling way, the 'kinship of life,' 'evolution: 

 what it is and what it is not ;' ' the elements of 

 organic evolution ;' ' the heredity of Richard 

 Roe ;' ' the distribution of species,' latitude and 

 vertebrije ;' finally attacking such subjects as 

 'the evolution of the mind,' 'degeneration,' 

 'hereditary inefficiency,' 'the woman of evo- 

 lution and the woman of pessimism,' ' the 

 stability of truth' and ' the struggle for realities.' 

 While the facts of organic evolution, or, to 

 use Geddes' term, bionomics, are discussed in 

 an interesting way, we have given us few new 

 facts or views, but current facts, opinions and 

 inferences are presented in a readable form. 

 We should naturally have expected, in the 

 chapter on the distribution of species, to be 

 treated to the discussion of data drawn from a 

 study of the animals of California, for the rela- 

 tion of the local varieties or incipient species 

 to their environment is very striking on the 

 Pacific coast, and could be made very interest- 

 ing and suggestive to readers not possessing a 

 special knowledge of the matter. To be sure, 



