Miscellaneous Scientific Intelligence. 391 



The scientific results of the expedition are being published by 

 the Department of the Naval Service at Ottawa and may even- 

 tually total twenty or thirty volumes. adolph knopf. 



8. *" The Evolution of Climates: by Marsden Manson. Pri- 

 vately printed (1922). 66 pages. — The author of this paper 

 concludes : (1) That solar control of climates did not prevail in 

 any period of the geologic past. Earth heat, conserved by a non- 

 conducting crust, was liberated slowly after crustal disturbances. 

 This heat warmed the oceans, which gave off vapor to form a 

 permanent cloud blanket. (2) After long periods of crustal 

 quiet the available heat decreased, the lands were cooled, and 

 giaciation resulted. In most cases the heat conserved in the 

 oceans prevented widespread giaciation and maintained warm 

 climates even in polar latitudes. Liberation of additional heat 

 from the earth, largely as a result of crustal failure under gla- 

 cial loading, restored universal mildness of climate. (3) In 

 the Pleistocene both land and ocean were greatly cooled. As a 

 consequence, cloudiness was reduced, and the present zonal 

 climates, under solar control, resulted. 



The scientific reader must feel that the author has not been able 

 "to explain the variations and developments of geologic and 

 present climates without resort to assumptions or working 

 hypotheses of any kind." For example the attempt in the paper 

 to link climate and diastrophism in a reversible reaction, making 

 glacial loading the chief cause of profound crustal disturbances, 

 is in itself a "working hypothesis" which serious students of 

 structural and historical geology will hardly accept. 



CHESTER R. LONG WELL. 



9. An Essay on the Physiology of Mind; bv Francis X. 

 Dercual Pp. 150. Philadelphia, 1922 ( W. B. Saunders Com- 

 pany). — This book revives a title which Maudsley used when he 

 published his well-known volume in 1867. Dr. Dercum endeav- 

 ors "to apply purely physical conceptions to the interpretation 

 of mind. ' ' The paradoxical wording of the title may be justified 

 by the materializing tendency of recent psychology and by the 

 opposite tendency of recent physics. "The modern study of 

 atom reveals it to be but an expression of energy, indestructible, 

 persistent, unknowable. Does not this cause the difference 

 between the old conceptions of 'material' and 'immaterial' to 

 disappear ? Does it not make unnecessary — as it is impossible — 

 a 'dual' conception of the universe?" 



\Ye should not, according to Dercum, introduce an immaterial 

 principle, like the psyche or the spiritus, to explain behavior; we 

 should frankly apply the mechanics or physiology of the amoeba 

 and sea-anemone to higher levels. Oxidation, reduction, arnoe- 

 boidism, transmitted compacts, destruction of molecules, polar- 

 ization, etc., account for lower forms of behavior, why not for 

 higher? "The 10,000 million intercalary neurones of the cortex 



