466 
Analyses of Boohs. 
[July, 
of “ Farini’s Zazel,” or of Maskelyne and Cook, or of the “ eagle- 
swoop ” of Mara z, as “triumphs of Science.” 
Prof. Lankester considers that the “ most frequent and ob- 
jectionable misuse of the word ‘ Science ’ is that which consists 
in confounding science with invention— [we think ‘ industrial 
art ’ would have been a happier word]— in applying the term 
which should be reserved for a particular kind of knowledge to 
the practical applications of that knowledge. . Such things as 
dearie lighting and telegraphs, the steam-engine, gas, and the 
smoky chimneys of faaories, are by a certain school of public 
teachers, foremost among whom is the late Oxford Professor of 
Fine Art, persistently ascribed to Science, or gravely pointed out 
as the pestilential produas of a scientific spirit.” 
Scientific men, in faa, find themselves placed between two 
fires. Men of business ridicule us for seeking after the cause ol 
the Aurora Borealis, or the laws which govern the distribution 
of colour in the plumage of a bird or the wing of a butterfly, and 
consider such knowledge utterly useless and frivolous. On the 
other hand, poets, parsons, artists, orators, metaphysicians sneer 
at us because the faas we discover or the generalisations we 
establish admit of, and sometimes receive, praaical applications, 
possibly of an unsesthetic character. How completely these two 
kinds of objections refute each other is completely overlooked. 
Passing from these introdudlory considerations to a sketch ot 
the do< 5 trine of organic development as regarded from the 
Darwinian point of view, the author shows that the action 01 
external forces upon a living being is not necessarily and invari- 
ably in one sole direction. Three results are possible : the 
organism may either remain in statu quo , or it may increase .in 
complexity of structure, or, again, it may decrease in complexity 
of structure. These three possible results Prof. Lankester calls 
respectively balance, elaboration, and degeneration. The two 
former of these cases have been fully recognised : it is admitted 
that certain animal species have remained from remote geolo- 
gical ages unmodified, — a faCt which certain writers, miscon- 
struing the very essence of the doCtrine of development, have 
wrested into an argument for the separate, and we might say the 
desultory, creation of every species. But degeneration, or 
degradation in structure, the descendant being lower in organisa- 
tion than its ancestors, has not been admitted by naturalists save 
in a few exceptional animals, — parasites, — and great credit is 
due to Dr. Dohrn, of the Naples Aquarium, for applying it in 
explanation of some animal relationships hitherto perplexing and 
mysterious. Degeneration is defined as a gradual change ot 
structure in which the organism becomes adapted to less varied 
and less complex conditions of life. Elaboration, on the other 
hand, is a gradual structural change in which the organism be- 
comes adapted to more and more varied and complex conditions 
of existence. “ In Elaboration there is a new expression ot 
