very new, nor very varied. It would not contain much that is great, except, perhaps, of lyrical poetry; it would contain much that is commonplace, and very little that is at all eccentric. The ordinary man or woman longs instinctively to see the evident well put, to get that answer to his or her own mental expectancy which the ear gets from a The Spectator. correct scale. We do not often find this primitive satisfaction in real life, and the function of art, in the mind of the ordinary man, is to supply it. He may know better, or rather he may have learned better, but he re-reads in accordance with his instinct, not his training. FIFTY YEARS OF EVOLUTION. The most significant character in Mr. Francis Darwin's presidential address to the British Association last week lay in its illustration of a treatment of evolutionary doctrine which is nothing less than a reversal of that employed by its earlier exponents. When Charles Darwin, by the publication of his "Origin of Species," provided the rising scientists of his age with a clear general conception of organic evolution, driven home by a vast array of inductive evidence, its first effect was to fortify the philosophy of mechanical determinism by which Herbert Spencer and others were laboring to explain the universe through an extension of physical formulæ. Research into origins naturally impels towards attempts to explain the later in terms of the earlier, the higher in terms of the lower. To explain man, as animal, by linking him historically with lower animals, to build a more or less continuous bridge along which the lowest organic forms were seen passing towards higher and more complex forms, to resolve the nature of these organic forms and their modes of advance into mechanical operations of matter and energy moving along lines of least resistance, to summarize the entire process from the orderly movements of the stars to the most delicate adjustments of human conduct in terms of molecular economy, all this was an intellectual necessity of the age. Our leading scientific men to-day have mostly abandoned this attempt to use Darwinism, or any other evolutionary doctrine, as a philosophy of nature or of life. For the most part they admit that science must confine herself to quantitative analysis, using for her tools assumptions and hypotheses which are only applicable for such purposes, and the absolute validity of which lies outside her consideration. They confess that while she can describe the processes of inorganic and organic phenomena, she cannot explain them as a completely intelligible system. This recogniton of the necessary limits of physical explanation is, no doubt, largely responsible for the growing tendency, particularly among biologists, to reverse the entire method and to apply concepts and formulæ de rived from the study of higher phenomena to the study of the lower. Thus Mr. Francis Darwin, in his fascinating survey of a large department of organic science, brings to his assistance, for interpreting the actions of plants and lowest animal forms, such terms as "habit" and "memory," taken directly from psychology. When he imputes to plants or worms changes of structure and behavior which he is driven to explain in such psychical terms, it is not particularly important to decide whether this use implies some sort of consciousness in them, or whether he is forcing an extension of the meaning of "habit" and "memory," or is using the language of "mere metaphor." The point is that he finds it convenient, and even necessary, to work downwards instead of upwards by the application of analogies which involve psychical or quasi-psychical interpretations of phenomena commonly classed as physical, instead of following the older method. Readers of his paper will generally agree that he justifies this method. It is difficult to deny something akin to memory to the stentor. "If a fine jet of water is directed against the disc of the creature, it contracts 'like a flash' into its tube. In about half a minute it expands again, and the cilia resume their activity. Now we cause the current to act again on the disc. This time the stentor does not contract, which proves that the animal has been in some way changed by the first stimulus. Here is a capacity for learning and for adjusting future conduct to what is learnt. The physical structure of the creature has been altered by its first experience, so it "reacts" differently against the second. It is hard to deny that here is "physical memory," or to refuse to recognize that our conscious memory also implies a similar physical apparatus of change. Or, again, take the force of habit in plant life. "If a sleeping plant is placed in a dark room after it has gone to sleep at night, it will be found next day in the light position, and will again assume the nocturnal position as evening comes on. We have, in fact, what seems to be a habit built by the alternative of day and night." Such conduct, less "reasonable," less economical, than that of the stentor, nevertheless involves a curious capacity for acquiring habit, by association of stimuli, which is, after all, nothing else than the physical equivalent for the association of ideas in human memory. That a whole rising school of botanists and biologists should have selected the term "race memory" as most suitable to describe the modus operandi of specific development is exceedingly instructive. Mr. Darwin's main theme was, indeed, nothing else than an exposition of the utility of this application. When an organism is subjected to an outer stimulus there occurs, not only an immediate reaction on its part, but, in many, probably all, cases, some morphological change which registers the stimulus and its first reaction. This register forms a latent memory in the sense of a capacity of regulating future action by past experience. Whether the effects of such stimuli through memory and habit are confined to the individual organism, or can also be transmitted to offspring is a question into which it is impossible for us to enter, though it involves very important consequences in the theory of organic progress. Spectators who have watched the heated controversy that has waged so long round Weismann's doctrine of "the continuity of the germ-plasm," with its implication of the non-inheritance of acquired characters, are relieved to recognize dstinct signs of compromise. The preposterous claims of absolute immutability and immobility made for the germ-plasm by its earlier prophets have been so greatly modified as to give reasonable hopes for a re statement of the relations between the soma and the germ-plasm which shall enable each new generation to reap at least some of the fruit of ancestral ex perience. If Mr. Darwin's interesting speculation of an elaborate system of nervous telegraphy, communicating every physical excitation from one part of the organism to all other parts, including the germ-plasm, should be verified, we seem well upon the way to a consistent view of something more than the mere mechanics of organic development in the individual and the species. For the practice of summoning the concepts of the higher sciences to help in interpreting the lower, based, as it is, upon the underlying and supreme hypothesis of the unity of nature, will certainly be carried further, with the result of a continually closer co-ordination of spiritual with mechanical interpretation. It is primâ facie unlikely that the logical requirement of continuity will allow Mr. Darwin, or any other scientist, to insist upon the purely physical character of the "memories" and "habits" he imputes to plants. Indeed, Mr. Darwin is absolutely openminded upon this, as upon so many other matters. "It is," he admits, “impossible to know whether or not plants are conscious; but it is consistent with the doctrine of continuity that in all living things there is something psychic, and, if we accept this point of view, we must believe that in plants there exists a faint copy of what we know as consciousness in ourselves." Hardly less significant as a recognition of the inadequacy of the older evotionary method is the frank avowal by Dr. Haldane of the failure of the physico-chemical explanation of life to exorcise "the spectre of vitalism." Physics and chemistry between them have failed to cope with physiological phenomena because their methods are mechanical and there is something in all life, even the lowest, which baffles me . chanical analysis. Though Dr. Haldane does not throw much light upon the new intellectual organon that is required he incidentally discloses the nature of the most fundamental defect in the evolutionary doctrine regarded as an "explanation." The whole apparatus of stimulation and reaction, memory and habit, natural selection, transmission by heredity, which evolutionary science sets up, consists of instruments for manipulating, economizing, and converting into growth and progress a flow of what used to be termed "vital energy." It is not merely the question for ignoring which Charles Darwin has been so often criticized, how the "variations" which are the condition and material for natural selection are brought about, but the further question of conceiving the creative or productive flow of energy which pulses through the whole organic (and inorganic) process. One does not explain the part played by the Nile in the economy of Egypt by the most accurate account of the construction and working of water-gates, dams, canals, and other irrigation works, if one neglects to explain the rise and flow of the Nile itself. It is the dim perception that physiology has been trying to do something like this that underlies the demands of the "vitalists." But it is a criticism applicable not to physiology alone, but to the whole trend of evolution in the hands of science. When Lamarck's conception of organic changes, as wrought by the pressure of a fund of desire or will enabling animals to adapt their structure to the satisfaction of their needs, collapsed before the rise of Darwinism, nothing was put in its place. Darwinism did not substitute any new conception of a fund of evolutionary progress, it merely sought to explain better than Lamarck how such a fund would be utilized by Nature. The anima in animate Nature is still commonly ignored. This remained possible, nay, almost inevitable, so long as a purely mechanical conception of causation was applied, for such conception only admits the registration of results and not the direct realization of efficient causes. It is a significant advance in scientific method to recognize, so clearly as do Mr. Darwin and Dr. Haldane, that the mechanical treatment requires to be fortified by a more truly "vital" method, and by hypotheses which transcend the realm of chemistry and physics. Though it may not be possible for a biologist, as such, to "put salt upon the tail of the vital prin The Nation. ciple," the growing tendency of these scientific thinkers to employ concepts derived from the higher processes of conscious life to give meaning to the current of evolution marks a distinct advance towards a natural philosophy, in which the course of development from simpler to more complex, nay, from "dead" to living matter, and from "mere" life to consciousness in its highest degree, shall be envisaged as a continuous transformation of a flow of universal energy, the dual character of which, physical and psychical, shall constitute the final working hypothesis of science. BOOKS AND AUTHORS It was only in his youth that John Ruskin was in the habit of "dropping into verse" and the Poems which are included in the Universal Edition of Ruskin's Works, of which E. P. Duttou & Co. are the American publishers, were all written between the ages of 15 and 26. They have a delicate touch, and some of them show a surprising mastery of the technique of verse. An introduction is supplied by Mr. G. K. Chesterton, who is always diverting, whatever his theme. "Angel Esquire," Mr. Edgar Wallace's new novel, is a story of a treasure guarded not only by deadly devices but by a cryptogram which the author leaves unexplained to madden the careful reader. A gang of burglars and murderers; a lawyer, apparently the soul of integrity, but really worse than the gang; a baronet in disguise, and police officers of high degree contend over the treasure, and Angel Esquire, detective, sits up aloft and outwits everybody to the reader's entertainment. As a tissue of impossibili ties woven into a fascinating pattern, the book is not likely soon to be surpassed. Henry Holt & Co. A delightfully intimate contribution to the knowledge of Mr. Gladstone's character is made in the slender volume "Mr. Gladstone at Oxford" (E. P. Dutton & Co.). The writer, the only clue to whose identity is found in the initials C. R. L. F. on the title-page, was resident at All Souls' College, Oxford, during Mr. Gladstone's famous visit in 1890, and being thrown into close association with Mr. Gladstone during that visit, and being a close listener to his remarkable conversation, conceived the happy thought of writing down every night, for the information of a devoted admirer of the great statesman, all that he could remember of the conversations and the incidents of the day. It is these informal letters which make up the present volume. There are portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone. In his "The Sense of the Infinite," Mr. Otto Kuhns has done a beneficent ceives that there is essential unity of the transcendental element lying at the heart of art, literature, and religion, and that this unity may be perceived at times by any humble seeker for enlightenment, also he opposes that theory which finds a pathological basis for many of the finer traits of human nature and reduces their manifestations to symptoms of disease. work is a history of the transcendental as it has made itself felt in the popular consciousness, and although it will hardly be as successful as small sentimental volumes of vagueness and quotations, it is sure to find a welcome. Henry Holt & Co. The Miss Caroline Mays Brevard owes it to her readers greatly to enlarge her tiny manual, "Literature of the South," for although it is not so small as to conceal her knowledge of the subject, or the sense of proportion enabling her justly to parcel out her few pages, it is too small to contain the information implied by the title. Devoting three chapters to the revolutionary and prerevolutionary periods, she follows them with others on Audubon, Poe, Legaré, Simms, the war poetry and subsequent literature, Timrod, Hayne and Lanier. Of the seven authors named, she gives good but brief critical biographies with chronologies, and, at intervals she gives brief literary chronologies and all with easy mastery. One regrets that her printer has misspelled Poe's middle name, and that the author does not think that Mrs. William Somerville who inspired Pinkney's "A Health," deserves special mention quite as much as Florida White, for whom Wilde wrote: "My life is like the summer rose." Above all, the book needs an index; without it much good work is "The garden city" is already something more than a dream, and now appears a formidable rival, the farm village of which Mr. Ramsey Benson writes in "A Lord of Lands," a happily suggestive title. This story of city families removed to virgin soil, each provided with a house and a holding ample to maintain it, sufficient to enrich it if wisely managed, is put into the mouth of a former workman, originally shrewd beyond the average, but so educated by the necessities of agricultural life, that he stands on the same level as the managers of great manufacturing enterprises or schemes of transportation. He minutely describes the progress of the little colony, giving all necessary figures, and by delicate touches and light lines his character and those of his neighbors are sharply defined; and one does not miss the illustrations with which such books ordinarily abound. The story has something to say not only to men and boys, but to women and girls, and should be in the school libraries and on the tables of the boys' reading rooms. Matthew Fitzgerald is an excellent specimen of the rarest type of Irishman, the type endowed with humor and imagination instead of the more showy and common gifts of wit and fancy; the type which leads because it understands itself, and being lord of itself is fitted to become "A Lord of Lands." A book giving such a character to the world would have no small value, even were it otherwise trivial. Henry Holt & Co. The worst trait of the Irish ward boss, his readiness to use ward, city, State, or the entire country to serve his personal desires, and dislikes, has been slighted if not entirely overlooked by most writers of the American political |