126 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. I. No. 5. 



yea, and the care of it sometimes loseth or 

 disturbeth the victory." 



Students who are drifting on the sea of 

 facts with which the modern laboratory has 

 flooded us declare that the doctrine of adap- 

 tation is antiquated and unscientific and 

 pernicious. 



They tell us organisms have many prop- 

 erties which are not adaptive, and that in 

 many other cases we cannot tell whether 

 a property is adaptive or not. Of course 

 this is ti'ue. No one supposes that suscep- 

 tibility to poisons, for example, is adaptive, 

 and our knowledge of nature is incomplete 

 beyond measure. 



They tell us, too, that many attempts to 

 explain the uses of parts are fanciful and 

 worthless. Unfortunately, this is ti-ue also, 

 but the logic which makes it a basis for deny- 

 ing the reality of adaptation is enough to 

 call Paley ft'om his grave. 



While protoplasm is the physical basis of 

 life, the intellectual basis of biology is ad- 

 justment. 



I should like to see hung on the walls of 

 every laboratory Herbert Spencer's defini- 

 nition to the effect that life is not proto- 

 plasm but adjustment, or the older teaching 

 of the Father of Zoology that the essence of 

 a living thing is not what it is made of nor 

 what it does, but why it does it. 



Spencer has given us diagrams to prove 

 that the vertebral column has become seg- 

 mented by the strain of flexion, but Aristo- 

 tle tells us that Empedocles and the ancients 

 are in eiTor in their attempts to account for 

 the jointing of the backbone by the strain 

 of flexion, for the thing to explain, he 

 says, is not how it becomes jointed, but how 

 the jointed backbone has become so beauti- 

 fully adjusted to the conditions of life. 



" Is there anything of which it may be 

 said : See, this is new. It hath been al- 

 ready in the old times which were before 

 i^s." W. K. Bkooks. 



Johns Hopkins University. 



CURRENT NOTES ON ANTHROPOLOGY (III.). 

 THE EARLIEST ENGLISHMEN. 



Some interesting studies as to the earliest 

 signs of human industry in England desei-^'e 

 a notice. 



The description bj^ Professor Prestwich 

 of some flint implements found by Mr. 

 Harrison in pre-glacial strata on the chalk 

 plateaii of Kent seems to have added an 

 impetus to such researches. Mr. 0. A. 

 Shrubsole describes a series of those relics 

 fi'om pre-glacial hill gravels in Berkshire, 

 in the Journal of the Anthropological Insti- 

 tute for August, 1894 ; and in the May 

 number of the same journal, Mr. A. M. Bell 

 replies with considerable force to the objec- 

 tions which had been urged againstProfessor 

 Prestwich's reasonings ; viadicating for the 

 Kent implements an antiquitj^ beyond that 

 of the formation of the present river valleys. 



A pleasantly written volume on the subject 

 is one by ISIr. Worthington G. Smith entitled, 

 Man the Primeval Savage. He discovered 

 a true palaeolithic workshop, or rather 

 several of them, in undisturbed relations, 

 near Dunstable, about thirty miles north of 

 London. The heaps of chips and broken 

 flints lay just as the primeval artist had left 

 them, covered to many feet in depth by the 

 washings fi-om the boulder clay. Mr Smith 

 was able to collect the chips in a number of 

 instances, and by fitting them together, 

 reconstruct the original flint block fi-om 

 which the instrument had been formed ; 

 and then to make a cast of the size and 

 shape of the tool represented by the cavity. 

 This beautiful demonstration leaves nothing 

 to be desired. He does not believe, how- 

 ever, that either his finds or those of the 

 others mentioned are pre-glacial. His book 

 is agreeably ^^Titten and well illustrated. 

 (Published by E. Stanford, London.) 



THE TRIBES OF THE ' GRAN CHACO.' 



The ' Gran Chaco,' or ' Great Hunting- 

 ground,' merits its name, for it extends 850 



