NEW BIOLOGICAL BOOKS 



573 



KONSTITUTIONSSEROLOGIE UND 

 BLUTGRUPPENFORSCHUNG. 

 By Ludwig Hirstfeld. Julius Springer 



18 marks 6f x io|; Z35 (paper) Berlin 

 A very useful work for all geneticists. 

 It critically and in sufficient detail reviews 

 all the work that has been done on blood 

 groups . The thoroughness of the survey 

 is indicated by the fact that the bibliog- 

 raphy covers x6 pages of fine print. We 

 heartily recommend this book to our 

 readers . 



SELECTIVE FERTILIZATION. 

 By Donald F. Jones. 



University of Chicago Press 

 $z.oo 5 x 7! ; xii + 163 Chicago 



An excellent review of the literature on 

 selective fertilization and assortative mat- 

 ing, to which the author himself has 

 notably contributed. 



GENERAL BIOLOGY 



FOIBLES OF INSECTS AND MEN. 

 By William M. Wheeler. 



Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. 

 $6.00 New York 



6\ x 9!; xxvi + 2.17 + xi 

 Anything that Professor Wheeler writes 

 is a delight, from every point of view. In 

 this beautifully made volume he has 

 collected together some of his addresses 

 and essays on subjects of broad, general 

 appeal. Here is preserved for all time the 

 Termitodoxa address, a piece of satire which 

 ranks with the very best in the English 

 language. To find its peer one must go 

 back to Swift. For professional reasons 

 the biologist will be glad to have here in 

 accurate form the essay on "The Ant 

 Colony as an Organism," first published 

 far in advance of its time, in the sense that 

 biological thought had not then reached a 



level to appreciate the fundamental signifi- 

 cance of this piece of work. The "Physi- 

 ognomy of Insects," first published in 

 The Quarterly Review of Biology, finds 

 in this volume a permanent home. The 

 Introduction to the volume is a masterly 

 discussion of "autistic" or wishful think- 

 ing as contrasted with realistic or scientific 

 thinking. 



Savages, children, theologians and many philos- 

 ophers are inveterately addicted to autistic thinking 

 and when, as commonly happens, this is compounded 

 with the grand foible of verbalism, we get those 

 astonishing aberrations of mythomania, superstition 

 and metaphysics from which the race has been 

 suffering ever since it began to think. Autistic 

 thinking is essentially magical and fails utterly to 

 attain its aim, which is a control, without a knowl- 

 edge, of phenomena; scientific thinking, however, 

 has shown that it can secure both a knowledge and a 

 control of phenomena and that the latter cannot be 

 secured without the former. In other words, experi- 

 ence has demonstrated that the explanations reached 

 as a result of emotional thinking — i.e., thinking 

 hobbled by fear, desire, aspiration, exaltation, etc. — 

 are intellectually and in practice nugatory, sterile, 

 misleading or even harmful, while those resulting 

 from scientific thinking, though it has been seriously 

 tried for only three centuries and by a very small 

 fragment of the race, have proved to be fruitful beyond 

 our wildest expectations. 



Full of erudition without pedantry, 

 pointed with wit, humor, satire, and 

 irony, written with literary distinction 

 and charm of the first order, this is such a 

 book as but rarely is given to us poorer 

 mortals. 



STRUCTURE AND DEVELOPMENT OF 

 THE "LIVING MATTER." 

 By F. Vejdovsky. 



Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences 



$35.00 Prague 



81 x n|; vii -f 360 + 2.4 plates 



(paper) 



Professor Vejdovsky is the doyen of 



Czechoslovak biology. This work may 



perhaps be regarded as his valedictory 



