1906. 
121 
REVIEWS. 
EVOLUTION FOR THE PEOPLE. 
Darwinism and the Problems of Life: A Stuch- of Familiar 
Animal Life. By Conrad GuenTher, Ph.D., Professor at the 
University of P'reiburg in Baden. Translated from the third edition 
by Joseph McCabe. Pp. 436. London: A. Owen & Co., 1906- 
Price I2s. 6d. 
In this book the author seeks to bring before the average intelligent 
reader, who has no special knowledge of zoology, the evidence for the 
evolution theory that may be derived from a survey of the field of anim?l 
life. As might be expected from a colleague of the great Weismann, the 
presentation of the subject is frankly " neo-Darwinian." Not the La- 
marckian factors only, and De Vries' doctrine of mutations, but Darwin's 
theory of sexual selection, and even Weismann's own contribution of 
germinal selection, are all rejected as needless accretions to that process 
of natural selection by which alone, so the author believes, the whole 
course of organic evolution can be explained. 
The book begins with a vivid account of animal life in a continental 
forest, and from this starting-point the reader is led to a survey of the 
principal groups of animals from the Mammalia to the Protozoa. Unfor- 
tunately the chapters containing this survey are marred by such an array 
of errors that the book (which is entirely without illustrations) will prove 
most misleading as regards zoological facts to any non-scientific reader. 
For example, we are told (p. 155) that " frogs have only one chamber to 
the heart"; that in birds (p. 102) there is a "rigid pelvis formed by the 
fusion of a number of vertebrae," and that 'the crop supplies the place of 
teeth." Then, turning to the insects, we learn that (p. 202) " masticators " 
are present in "locusts, moths [!], and beetles, because they chew their 
food," and (p. 187) that in moths "the larva does not differ so much from 
the imago." Yet a few lines lower down we read, '• it is othervvise with 
butterflies," and two pages further on we meet with " nocturnal butter- 
flies (or moths)." 
It would be insulting to Prof, Guenther to believe him capable of such 
blunders, and the use of the word "moths" in the two contradictory 
senses just quoted shows that the translator has but a scant knowledge 
either of zoology or of common English animal names. He calls the 
harmless Ring-snake, for example, an " adder." Yet there are not a few 
erroneous statements that can hardly be mistranslations. The footnote 
on pp. 202-3 implies that the triungulin larva of Strepsiptera enters the 
imago and not the larva of the hymenopterous hoot. The bird's wing is 
said (p. 157) to possess '* rudiments of five fingers, though the archseop- 
teryx had them well developed and active." And it is stated incidentally 
that there are " many species " of Dipnoi (p. 151). Furthermore, the author 
is not sufficiently careful to distinguish between facts and theories in his 
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