BOOKS AND CURRENT LITERATURE 



317 



ical properties of these five substances, and these properties are all clearly 

 shown to contribute toward extreme fitness of the environment. The 

 presentation is very thorough, considering the small size of the book, and 

 the outcome of it is highly convincing, The properties of water and 

 carbon dioxide, and their elements, are almost all maxima or minima 

 in the scale of the properties of the substances and elements known to 

 exist in the universe; not only is the environment of living things fit, 

 but it is more fit, for complex, regulated and metabolic mechanisms, 

 than any other envirorunent of which the universe is or has been 

 capable. "No other environment consisting of primary constituents 

 made up of other known elements, or lacking water and carbonic acid, 

 could possess a like number of such highly fit characteristics, or in 

 any manner such great fitness to promote complexity, durability, and 

 active metabolism in the organic mechanism which we call life" (p. 

 272). "Given matter, energy, and the resulting necessity that life 

 shall be a mechanism, the conclusion follows that the atmosphere of 

 solid bodies does actually provide the best of all possible environments 

 for life" (p. 273). 



In the final chapter, on life and the cosmos, some of the more philo- 

 sophical aspects of the problem in hand receive brief attention. The 

 fitness of the environment is "no mere accident; an explanation is to 

 seek. It must be admitted, however, that no explanation is at hand" 

 (p. 276). Biology "has not been able to escape the recognition of 

 natural formative tendency, which Darwin identified as the result of nat- 

 ural selection. And now it appears to be necessary to postulate a 

 like tendency in the evolution of inorganic nature" (p. 280). An in- 

 teresting discussion of the struggle in biology beween the ideas of vitalism 

 and those of mechanism closes this chapter, but an adequate idea of this 

 cannot be here presented. 



There are few features of the book that can be criticised adversely, 

 and those few he largely in fields where feeling and not ratiocination con- 

 trol. To the reviewer, for example, there seems no reason for maintain- 

 ing the time-honored fine of demarcation between science and philosophy; 

 whatever portions of philosophy can justly have place within the realm of 

 knowledge must be accounted science, the rest is perhaps art. Meta- 

 physics looks out upon the same universe as does biology, and the sooner 

 the two can join their forces the more rapidly may we hope to advance 

 our understanding of the things about us and within us. Also, the idea 

 is manifest at various points throughout the book, that some things are 

 still to be explained by chance or accident (e.g., p. 304). Would it 



