iz8 



THE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF BIOLOGY 



campaign of mayhem it is just as well to 

 be discriminatory. If all the biblical 

 brothers were as intelligent as, on the 

 average, are those who perform the 

 Episcopalian mysteries perhaps there 

 would be no necessity for the evolutionary 

 cohorts to gird their loins. 



"Evolution" is going to be an entertain- 

 ing little paper, if one may judge by the 

 first number. David Starr Jordan, Wil- 

 liam K. Gregory, and Henshaw Ward 

 contribute significant and readable articles 

 and the editorial staff dresses up the 

 number with merry and apposite jests. 

 At a dollar a year a large subscription 

 list ought to be readily obtained. Every 

 teacher of biology can have great fun by 

 giving his students access to this periodi- 

 cal. 



THE SUPERFLUOUS MAN. 

 By Milton W. Brown. 



Standard Publishing Co. 

 $z.oo 5 1 x 7I; Z96 Cincinnati 



It is stated in Who's Who that a lecture 

 called "The Superfluous Man" has been 

 delivered by Dr. Brown more than 1500 

 times. Now it is embodied in this book. 

 It is difficult to characterize the book 

 briefly because there are so many differ- 

 ent kinds of things in it. We are not 

 even quite sure who the superfluous man 

 is, but A. E. Wiggam and E. G. Conklin 

 seem to come in for the most extensive and 

 severe disapproval. The chapter on "In- 

 tolerance" has entertained us most, be- 

 cause in it is developed the thesis that to 

 forbid by law the teaching of organic 

 evolution cannot justly be regarded as an 

 act of intolerance. By a series of ingeni- 

 ous quotations from Conklin, Wiggam, 

 and Coulter, coupled with the neat argu- 

 ment that when the evolutionist says that 



fiat creation is unthinkable he overlooks 

 the fact that every artist does this very 

 thing as a part of his job and that what 

 such mere men can do will certainly be no 

 difficulty at all for God, the reader is led 

 to the following conclusion: "In view of 

 the foregoing statement by a great scien- 

 tist [Coulter], it becomes perfectly clear to 

 the layman that the insistence, the great 

 outcry about liberty of thinking, relative 

 to the Tennessee law forbidding the 

 definite teaching, as an established truth, 

 that man descended from a lower order, is 

 neither a limitation of intellectual freedom 

 nor is it — as so many editorials have 

 thundered — an outburst of fanatical ig- 

 norance." 



There is a good deal of discussion of the 

 problem of population, and again the 

 novelty and unexpectedness of the con- 

 clusions reached must certainly amuse, 

 even though they may fail entirely to 

 convince the reader. 



"The influence of the Christian church 

 is to greatly increase the prosperity of its 

 members, to impel them toward better 

 living conditions, and hence the move- 

 ment of population from the country and 

 congested districts to the better residential 

 districts, and the very sharp decline in the 

 size of families. 



"Christianity thus checks population 

 through prosperity and happiness and en- \ 

 largement. Thus Christianity ultimately 

 cures the evil of overpopulation in a most 

 happy way. While the earliest effect of 

 Christian activities is indeed to save popu- 

 lations from starvation and pestilence, 

 their full effect utterly corrects any threat 

 to over-population." 



The title of this book seems too subtle. 

 We suggest that a more informative one 

 would have been Rotary-Khvanian Funda- 

 mentalism, approved by George F. Babbitt and 

 Elmer Gantry. 



