PROGRESS IN STUDY OF VARIATION, HEREDITY, EVOLUTION 165 



not having had an opportunity of consulting the Linn. Herb., con- 

 sidered Stipa membranacea was the earliest binomial. As I have 

 said, Gen. Munro so identified it, and Sir James E. Smith has 

 written on the specimen, " F. uniglumis proxima." I have no 

 doubt Munro' s identification is correct, although it is very different 

 in habit from the grass when growing in mobile sea-sand, and a 

 side-light is thrown on this point by a cultivated specimen in Herb. 

 Brit. Mus. closely resembling the Linnean type from Hugh Davies, 

 of Anglesey, who draws attention to its very different appearance 

 from the normal sea-coast form. I therefore venture to contend 

 that, if the earliest trivial is to be maintained, our plant must be 

 known as Festuca membranacea. — G. Claridge Druce. 



A Correction. — Owing to a misunderstanding, the measure- 

 ments of the figures on Plate 484 a have been given on p. 85 in- 

 correctly ; they should be twice as great as there given — viz. 

 figs. 1, 2, x 50; figs. 3, 4, 5, x 250. 



The conclusion as to the true position of Splachnobryum being 

 among the Splachnacea has been recently confirmed on independent 

 grounds by W. J. Jongmans (Uber Brutkorper bildende Laubmoose; 



Nijmegen, 1907). — H. N. Dixon. 



NOTICE OF BOOK. 



Recent Progress in the Study of Variation, Heredity, and Evolution. 



By Kobert H. Lock, M.A. Pp. 299, with forty-seven figures 

 and diagrams, and five portraits. London : John Murray. 

 Price 7s. 6d. net. 



The University of Cambridge seems to be the headquarters of a 

 school of philosophical biologists, who, profoundly interested in 

 those problems of biology which at first were " made in Germany," 

 and fascinated the minds of the keenest scientists among those 

 engaged in original research in the Fatherland, while they adopted 

 German methods both of analysis and synthesis of facts and 

 theories, have succeeded in forming an English group of workers 

 in the problems of life and mind, the progress and results of whose 

 labours are in no wise less important and often more lucid in their 

 literary expression than those of their German co-workers in similar 

 fields of investigation and scientific research. The problems which 

 modern biology is attacking with perennial vigour bear chiefly on 

 Variation and Heredity, and the side issues either involved in them 

 or associated with them- Natural Selection, which formerly occu- 

 pied such a prominent place in the Darwinian scheire of the 

 survival and salvation of the fittest (a prominence, however, which 

 was neither sanctioned nor encouraged by Darwin himself either 

 in his correspondence or in his later works), is now, by general 

 consent, relegated to the more subordinate position of an agency 

 which is no longer considered causal but directive. 



Mr. Lock tells the story of the progress towards solution of the 



