890 THE AMERICAN NATURALIST. [Vou. XXXIII. 
The style is easy, direct, and colloquial, and expresses a consistent 
endeavor after the utmost simplicity of statement and freedom from 
all technical terminology. One might call these booklets “guides 
to scientific thinking,” in short words with easy illustrations, for their 
burden is told as to a child and the reader is du-und-diched through- 
out. Withal, however, the arrangement is clear and the exposition 
good, and the striving after simplicity is induced by a sense of the 
great impediments which the untrained thinker must meet in dealing 
with all profound critical problems. For the object of these studies 
is not to make known new facts to the reader but to stimulate him 
to logical reflection, not to furnish the memory but to arouse inde- 
pendent thinking. The world is fond of a phrase, for thinking is 
burdensome, and there are many technical terms on the lips of the 
reading public which have filtered through the magazines and popu- 
lar books from scientific writings and are facilely employed but ill- 
understood. Evolution, mechanism and teleology, heredity and 
Darwinism, egoism, freedom of the will, — these phrases clothe the 
most significant problems of science and philosophy. The moment 
a new thought, a successfully daring speculation is represented in a 
phrase the imitative herd seizes upon it and bandies it glibly about, 
with commonly the most inadequate grasp of its meaning. To 
arouse a candid reflection upon such terms, to make the reader hon- 
estly attempt an analysis and comprehension of them for himself is 
the aim of these little books. ; 
The following chapters of the series are already announced : Evo- 
lution in Nature; Heredity and Darwinism; On the Freedom of 
the Will; The Philosophy of Egoism; Mechanism and Organism ; 
Instinct; On a priori Knowledge; The Division of Labor; On Posi- 
tivism in Natural Science; The Mechanics of Evolution; Morals 
and Intellect. RoBERT MACDOUGALL. 
ZOOLOGY. 
Emery’s Zoologia. — The last fifteen years have been characterized 
by the appearance of an unusual number of good zoölogical text-books. 
Most of these works have first appeared in German, French, or Eng- 
lish ; Emery’s! Compendium of Zoölogy is in Italian. The field covered 
1 Emery, C. Compendio di Zoologia. vii +456 pp., 600 illustrations and a map. 
Bologna, Nicola Zanichelli, 1899. 
