NOTES AND LITEEATURE 



THE DOCTRINE OF EVOLUTION 



In 1 "The Doctrine of Evolution," Professor Crampton is 

 issuing in book form eight "Hewitt Lectures" delivered at 

 Cooper Union in 1907 before "audiences made up almost ex- 

 clusively of cultivated minds, but who were, on the whole, quite 

 unfamiliar with the technical facts of natural history. . . . The 

 course was, in a word, a simple message to the unscientific." 



The scientific reader of this book, can not expect, then, to dis- 

 cover a new message in it for himself unless he be pretty woe- 

 fully ignorant of all things connoted by the word evolution. 

 And he will not. Or perhaps after all he will. For if he be 

 a reader who relegates evolution to the world of lower creatures, 

 the plants and "animals," he may find himself suddenly learn- 

 ing that he too is a part of evolution and nothing else besides. 

 Because that is what this book teaches very strongly. Four of 

 the eight chapters of it discuss the evolution of man; first, the 

 evolution of his physical self, then of his mental self, then of 

 his social and ethical self, and finally of all there is left of him, 

 to wit, his religious, theological and philosophical self. It is 

 this part of the book that as "a simple message to the unscien- 

 tific" may make even a few scientific open wide eyes and be 

 strongly attracted or repelled by it. For the treatment of man 

 in all his parts and activities as a wholly natural, perfectly ex- 

 plicable and perhaps quite to be expected product of the great, 

 world-dominating, blind causa efficiens that is evolution, has 

 not been more lucidly, strongly and consistently done — that is, 

 as far as my reading goes. This may, of course, say more about 

 the limitations of my reading than of the quality of Professor 

 Crampton 's book; but that is the reader's risk with any 



Especially is Chapter VII, "Social Evolution as a Biological 

 Process," well handled. There is more of a whole-souled sure- 

 ness with less of an imitating dogmatism of language about the 



^'The Doctrine of Evolution," by Henry Edward Crampton, professor 

 of zoology in Columbia University," 311 pp., 1911, Columbia University 

 Press, New York, $1.50. 



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