234 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



Prof. Bateson is a convinced and thorough Mendelian and his terminology 

 is formidable. The work would surely have been not only more useful 

 but more lucid and even more thoroughly scientific if Prof. Bateson 

 had translated his heterozygotes and allelomorphs into the simple English 

 language. Had he done so, he would have avoided certain scarcely 

 justifiable expressions regarding Prof. Pearson and the Biometricians, 

 and might then have been not only more lucid but less rash in his 

 conclusions. 



Thus it is not, for instance, obvious to the ordinary mind that colour- 

 blindness must be always inherited through the mother, even although in 

 thirty-eight cases the sons of colour-blind fathers possessed normal sight. 

 Then again we find on page 127 " whereas in all cases of sensible allelo- 

 morphism, the number of classes is three only, two being homozygous 

 and one heterozygous." 



There is nothing new in the idea that children may inherit one special - 

 characteristic from either father or mother or in a blended form from both 

 parents. Even in ordinary cases, such as that of the Bassett Hounds, it 

 is certainly not one pair of characters but a great number which are in 

 question. These may be independent or they may be correlated in many 

 intricate ways. 



The author's own formula (given on p. 60) is not very clearly stated 

 but it is enough to show that even with only twenty pairs of characters 

 the types amount to so portentous a number that they become quite 

 unworkable in practice. 



" Darwin and Modern Science." Edited for the Cambridge Philo- 

 sophical Society and the Syndics of the University Press, by A. C. 

 Seward, Professor of Botany in the University. Five illustrations, 8vo., 

 595 pp. (University Press, Cambridge, 1909.) 18s. net. 



The centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the fiftieth 

 anniversary of the publication of the "Origin of Species" has been 

 fittingly commemorated by the production of this interesting and 

 valuable book. The Cambridge Philosophical Society, and the Syndics 

 of the University Press have certainly been excellently advised in adopting 

 this method of signalizing a great scientific landmark. 



The volume consists of twenty-nine essays written by distinguished 

 foreigners, Cambridge men, and a few others. There is first an intro- 

 ductory letter by Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker. The other articles are as 

 follows : — 



"Darwin's Predecessors," by Professor T. Arthur Thomson (Aber- 

 deen). No one interested in the history of evolution can afford to neglect 

 this contribution, which is one of the most valuable in the whole volume. 

 It is full of information not easily obtained, and written in a clear and 

 interesting manner. 



" The Selection Theory," by Professor August Weismann, contains 

 much that is new and unexpected. We cannot resist quoting in full the 

 following prescient passage. " Thus everything which we can see in 

 animals is adaptation, whether of to-day or of yesterday or of long gone 

 by ; every kind of cell, whether glandular, muscular, nervous, epidermic 

 or skeletal, is adapted to absolutely definite and specific functions, and 



