Recent Books of Science

By E. T. Brewster
Saved Stories

THE interested spectator of the game which natural science plays against the universe must regret the termination, for him, of one of the liveliest passages in the entire contest. In less time than it took Columbus to get together the funds for his expedition, or than Newton waited for one datum of his calculations, or than Galileo wasted in prison, radium and radio-activity have been discovered, the atomic theory has collapsed, the electron theory has taken its place, and the physics of the atom has ranged itself among the steady-going branches of knowledge, where the newspaper headline knows it no more. Inevitably, as the punctum vegetationis of science develops into a vigorous shoot and begins to lay down its woody fibre, the supply of popular books concerning it drops sharply. It seems likely, therefore, that for some years to come successive editions of Professor Rutherford’s work1 will remain the best source of information for the reader in whom may be assumed a certain modicum of technical information; while for the general reader Professor Duncan’s well-knit exposition of the new knowledge 2 will hardly be supplanted by anything better of its sort.

Pretty much all that is sound, and not a little that is dubious, in contemporary work on the activities of animals and plants, rests on the underlying assumption that life is ultimately a matter of physics and chemistry. The practical worker in the field of living things rather takes it for granted that he knows what God and man are, only so far as he is able to take some part of nature into his laboratory and there compel it to his bidding. In all the biological sciences, anatomy tends to give way to physiology, and the man of science who used to be taunted with trying to find Life with a scalpel is now trying to drive it like a motor car.

The living organism is, then, in current opinion, nothing more than a chemical machine. For the present, indeed, we are unable to construct such machines for ourselves; largely because, for various reasons, we really know very little about the physics of the colloids. Nearly all vital activities, however, can now be imitated artificially one by one, so that it would seem to be only a question of time before somebody will succeed in combining enough of these in a single structure to carry the resulting creature across the uncertain line w7hich separates the quick from the dead. Such, at least, is the sure and steadfast hope of many a working biologist.

Such a scientific materialism is, as usual, amply justified by its works. The test of science is always its ability to predict the future or to control it; and only so far as the living organism is a machine is it possible to account for the extraordinary degree to which its activities can now be guided and modified. Each issue of the journals devoted to such topics adds its new record of achievement. Hydroids with polyps on both ends of the stem, planarians with supernumerary heads and tails anywhere on the body, crabs with antenna? in place of eyes, have become only a matter of operative dexterity. The very undergraduates at the seaside laboratories can turn out twoheaded creatures and double monsters of all sorts; make any number of embryos, short of a dozen, from the material that nature designed for one, or, on the other hand, fuse as many separate eggs into one monstrous being. Give the right man a few ordinary chemicals, and he will set you any common muscle beating rhythmically like a heart; he will mate together a sea-urchin and a starfish, which are related about as are a turtle and a duck, and their common offspring shall be like nothing else that ever the waters brought forth; he will bring about the development of unfertilized eggs of a score or two of different animals of all degrees of complexity, including, thus far, at least two vertebrates. If, therefore, the physiologist is still unable to build the living machine, he has at least found out something about running it.

This thoroughly mechanical view of the life of animals and plants, together with the great mass of new facts upon which the body of opinion rests, has never had a more effective presentation, taking it purely as a matter of science, than this of Professor Jacques Loeb.3 A brilliant experimenter, who has always preferred the skirmish line of science to the main column, he writes clearly, as one who has spent his life in clear thinking. There is no better exposition to be had than that of the best of the university lecturers, and Professor Loeb is by no means least of these in the skill with which he assembles and arranges his material. The book before us, while of necessity it touches upon the author’s own work, since without that there would be appreciably less for anybody to say, is primarily a survey of recent advances in the entire field of general animal physiology, and the history of the work that has led up to it. The book is in all respects a worthy member of the Columbia University Biological Series, of which it is the eighth volume. I could not give it higher praise.

The same general point of view, but from the botanical side, appears in a suggestive work by Professor Jagadis Chunder Bose of Calcutta.4 Four years ago Professor Bose published an account of certain experiments of himself and his associates, which went to show that many of the characteristic responses to stimuli of animals and plants occur also in inorganic bodies. He showed, for example, that a strip of india rubber can be excited by rapid thermal shocks to contract like a voluntary muscle, and that protracted stimulation produced the familiar fatigue-reversals of skeletal muscle. It followed pretty obviously from these experiments that the responsiveness of living things is the result of the molecular constitution of their protoplasm. Since, however, the protoplasm of animals and plants is essentially identical, Professor Bose “next undertook to demonstrate that all the important characteristics of the responses exhibited by even the most highly differentiated animal tissues were also to be found in those of the plant.”

The present work takes up the methods and results of this study of what one is tempted to call the animal physiology of plants. The account itself is too detailed and too diffuse to be read straight through by any but a lover of plants or a student of the problem. It is, however, simple and straightforward, while summaries at the end of each chapter make straight in the desert a highway for the skipper. The results are in the highest degree interesting and important.

The higher plants, usually regarded as insensitive, are, it appears, in the position of animals shut up in wooden boxes. We know that they do move, for we see them screw their leaves round to face the sun, open and shut their flowers, cling to supports with their tendrils. When, however, these motions are made to record themselves by means of delicate instruments, it transpires that the plant gives motile responses to almost any sort of stimulus that would affect an animal. Heat, cold, electric shocks, irritant drugs, wounds, all induce characteristic reactions. The plant becomes fatigued, is put to sleep by ether, drugged with alcohol. It shows the familiar threshold of stimulation and latent period, while an impression made at one point is conveyed to a distant region at a definite velocity nearly as great as the nervous conductivity of some of the slower animals. Soft tissues with a fibrous structure, such as stamens, may be stimulated to repeated contraction, like striped muscle; there is not lacking in the plant even the distinction between the tissue which contracts rhythmically, like the heart, and that which responds only when stimulated.

Work of this sort, on the face of it, would seem to assimilate the plant to the animal; the practical effect has been to assimilate the animal to the plant. Persons of Professor Loeb’s way of thinking regard a good half of the apparently purposeful acts of the lower animals as but so many plant-like or machine-like reactions, denying them even the poor gift of instinct; while zoölogist and botanist are at one in assigning a host of attributes of living creatures, in spite of seeming utility, to the inherent properties of their life-stuff rather than to any process of evolution. Thus organic inheritance becomes a matter of chemistry, mind in the simpler creatures an illusion, and their life a by-product of their metabolism.

The same general body of opinion, set off by a flavor of heresy, appears in two new books on an old topic; and, as usual, the heresy consists in an exaggeration of one aspect of the common doctrine.

Dr. Bastian 5 goes one step beyond general contemporary opinion. It appears from the reports of a number of different observers that, even in the case of creatures of a fairly complex organization, hydroids and worms, the adult may by appropriate means be induced to reverse its development and return to the embryonic condition. Moreover, the twice-born organism may, in a few cases at least, be induced to grow up for the second time, sometimes into a different structure from its former adult condition. At any rate, there is abundant evidence that the various parts and tissues of animals whose structure is not too complex are largely interchangeable, in the sense that the material which went to form one might under other circumstances have gone to build another. What warrant, therefore, that with the still simpler unicellular organisms, the substance of one creature may not be changed over into something very different ?

This is essentially Dr. Bastlan’s theory of Heterogenesis. In much the same way that De Vries finds one species of primrose growing from the seed of another, Dr. Bastian sees moulds arise from bacteria, unicellular green water plants turn to diatoms, and even the immature eggs of a small fly, failing to develop normally, continue their lives as amœbas. Moreover, he has found living bacteria and yeasts in situations where in his opinion they could have arisen only by “spontaneous generation.” Few of these observations, however, seem to be corroborated by other men. At the same time, it is hard to suspect of crude blundering a veteran microscopist and a Fellow of the Royal and Linnean societies. Whatever one may think of the group of opinions which Dr. Bastian has maintained for a generation, consistently and almost alone, he is at least a learned man and a skillful writer, so that his discussion of the general problem is most illuminating. The notion is an inheritance from prescientific days; it has been disposed of over and over again, and is probably not true. Yet if ability to rise again after repeated crushings to earth be any test of truth, Dr. Bastian has fairly proved his case.

Mr. J. Butler Burke 6 departs in somewhat different direction from the faith just discovered by the saints. If life is the result of molecular structure, there is no special reason why protoplasm should be the only life-stuff, merely because it has turned out, on the whole, to be the best. Why not, then, attempt the construction of living creatures of other stuffs, that can be more easily handled ?

The idea is fanciful enough, and innocent enough, withal, of any contact with the world of fact. Its claim to public attention lies in the enterprise of the daily press, and in Mr. Burke’s success in giving a local habitation, and incidentally a name, to his speculative and airy nothings, by devising a sort of artificial life on the basis of the liveliest of metals. With radium chlorid or bromid in place of the “ polymeric carbon ” (whatever that may be), which Mr. Burke thinks to be the font and origin of life, and gelatin for flesh and blood, he did apparently succeed in generating certain minute creatures that are certainly not the offspring of anything on sea or land. These, nevertheless, grew, developed smaller structures like nuclei within their bodies, reproduced themselves by division, after the manner of bacteria, and finally, after running through their life cycle, died and disappeared. Mr. Burke will have it that beings that do these things are alive; but Mr. Burke is a physicist. The biologists, already familiar with artificial creatures which go through a few of the motions of living, have been pretty unanimously of the contrary opinion.

Now, however, that Mr. Burke’s own book is out, and we are able to learn the full details of his work, it turns out that the matter is not especially important. In fact, even from Mr. Burke’s own text, it is by no means easy to make out precisely what it is he thinks he has been doing. The “marked cloudiness” of his gelatin preparations seems to have extended itself to his style; while he possesses neither the learning nor the clarity of mind which give value to Dr. Bastian’s treatment of the same topics, irrespective of his personal views. Both books, however, show how tenuous nowadays has become the once solid partition between the two realms of nature.

These four books, then, one with another, cover pretty completely the general problem of the nature of life and living matter, so far as the question is purely a biological one. Yet though, as a working theory, mechanism has completely supplanted vitalism, “vitality” has never joined caloric and phlogiston, the crystal spheres and the firmament of heaven, in the land of scientific shades. There remain still certain wider aspects of the problem, questions of analysis quite as much as of fact; and these it has fallen to Sir Oliver Lodge to discuss.7

Sir Oliver reminds one of Huxley. Without Huxley’s brilliancy, he has the same gift for expounding technical matters untechnically, the same scorn of authority, and the same readiness to assail friend or foe alike when either strays toward “that nebulous country,”as Huxley said, “where words take the place of ideas.” Like Huxley, too, Sir Oliver is a skeptic of that uncommon and thoroughgoing sort that has no a priori opinions whatever, and is prepared, therefore, to believe anything on evidence. One could wish that Life and Matter were somewhat less controversial in form, that it somewhat less obviously grew out of separate articles and addresses; still more could one wish that the discussion were less condensed, for the book is but a little one: one could not ask for more penetrating criticism of current opinions by a great scientist who is as little given to serving idols of the cave as of the market place.

Very pertinently does our author point out that the argument for life as a property of protoplasm is essentially the same as that which, not so many years ago, proved magnetism to be a property of iron. We knew magnetism only in connection with certain kinds of iron, in which it originated, we knew not how. We could make new magnets indefinitely, but only from other magnets; and when a magnet died or was killed, its magnetism, to all appearances, was as completely annihilated as the life of a dead plant. Yet it turned out that the magnetism is not in the iron at all. Though one create a million new magnets, he does not increase thereby in the smallest measure the amount of magnetism in the world; nor diminish it by destroying them again. Iron but manifests a preëxistent magnetism; but taps an infinite reservoir of power, which it neither lessens nor augments. Our physicist, once bitten,is twice shy. Consistent skeptic that he is, he will wait for the demonstration that the life is, in any real sense, in the body at all, before he commits himself to any of the implications of that opinion. As a scientific man, he is ready to accept any fact that Loeb or Bose or Bastian has to offer him; he would not be in any wise put out to learn that Burke’s radiobes had escaped from the Cavendish Laboratory and added themselves to the local flora; but concerning the entire mechanical interpretation of these facts, Sir Oliver Lodge, like John Doe, “affirmeth his ignorance and requireth proof. ”

Sir Oliver may well be skeptical: one promising science has just been grassed by an amateur. The scientific dietitians, Voit and the rest, had it all nicely figured out just how much fuel each of us needs to run his bodily engine, — so many calories for the man at light work, so many for the boy at heavy play. Then appeared a middle-aged business man, doing his day’s work, celebrating his fiftieth birthday by a two-hundred-mile bicycle ride, training with the Yale crew, all on a diet which should have been barely sufficient to keep the breath of life in a poor needlewoman.

The first man of science to perceive the importance of Mr. Horace Fletcher’s private regimen was a Dr. Van Someren; the most conspicuous, Sir Michael Foster. Only in America, however, are physiological laboratories equipped with apparatus sufficient to handle men: the prophet came to honor in his own country, with Dr. Anderson’s tests at the Yale gymnasium, and Professor Chittenden’s8 starvation squad. The outcome thus far is that Mr. Fletcher is alive, and in peculiarly vigorous health, half a dozen years after he should have starved to death; scores of men of all sorts and conditions have lived and done their full work under medical observation on half rations or less, while thousands have adopted Fletcherism for their own personal convenience. How the matter will finally turn out, nobody knows. It may be that personal idiosyncrasies are more important than has been supposed, or it may be that Voit ought not to have multiplied by two after he had guessed at half. Whatever the upshot, few questions of science concern so immediately the citizen and tax-payer.

Mr. Fletcher’s own accounts of the new dietetics 9 are pretty diffuse, and lacking in important detail. A much better discussion comes from the pen of an English medical man,10 while liveliest and most easily read of them all is the chapter on foods in a vivacious little handbook of personal hygiene by a New York physician.11

Again, however, the really important contribution to the subject is the work of a layman. Mr. Russell has assembled from all kinds of sources a vast deal of precise information concerning the actual diet of races, communities, and individuals.12 Men, it appears, have lived and thriven about equally well upon the most diverse articles of food, from oaten cakes to locusts and wild honey; while, contrary to the popular opinion, if only the food be wholesome in itself, sufficient, but not too abundant, whether it be animal or vegetable counts for very little. The peaceful and by no means energetic Eskimos live perforce entirely on meat; the Bedouins, Turks, Sikhs, and Dyaks, who have not been conspicuously peaceful, and the Chinese and Japanese, who are not at all indolent, eat no meat at all. Upon the whole, the roast beef of old England has not made better men than potatoes and the “halesome parritch.”

Contrary to general opinion, neither the race nor the battle is always to the carnivore. One has only to pair off against one another similar peoples with unlike diets, Apaches and Peruvians, English and Scotch, Koreans and Japanese, to discover that the able and successful human stocks have by no means always been those most abundantly fed, nor those which have preyed most ruthlessly upon their fellow vertebrates. In fact, Mr. Russell, though he holds no brief for any theory or system, does most distinctly afford aid and comfort to the Fletcherite and the vegetarian.

While, however, Mr. Russell goes far toward demonstrating “that man thrives on almost any kind of diet common to a nation,” he discovers one most unfortunate exception to the rule in the diet of modern states. The combination of alcohol, tea, white flour, and inferior but too abundant meat he holds responsible for both urban and rural degeneration, and for most of the ills which beset civilized countries. The two opinions are not obviously consistent, although one is supported by a considerable body of evidence, and the other conforms to present - day fashion in social philosophy. Curiously, to follow an old division of mankind, the most thoroughgoing Deteriorationist, to whom even the shorter working day is a sign of increasing debility, and the extreme Perfectibilian, who expects the millennium after the next election, both alike look to environment as the source of progress and decay. Both, therefore, should find Mr. Russell quite to their minds.

Against this social Lamarckianism may be matched, from the side of the Darwinians, Dr. Woods’s elaborate study of inheritance among the royal families of Europe.13 There have been, thus far, only three important studies of mental and moral heredity. The first was Galton’s really epoch-making work of ’69, his Hereditary Genius; the second was Karl Pearson’s study of the resemblances between pairs of brothers and pairs of sisters among English school children; the third is the work before us.

All three studies arrive at precisely the same conclusion: mental and moral qualities of men are inherited, like their physical traits, while both are transmitted on the same terms as are the attributes of animals and plants. Galton proved the case for the higher grades of ability, Pearson for single qualities, like vivacity or conscientiousness. Now Dr. Woods extends the argument to include all ranges of ability, and to specific mental and moral types. Together they make out a pretty complete case for Gallon’s Law in the spiritual world.

Gallon’s Law is, of course, like all the laws of science, a formula for predicting numerically some one aspect of the future. Much of Dr. Woods’s attention, therefore, is given to just this sort of forecasting. So-and-so, with such-and-such ancestry, married So-and-so, whose family was thisand-that; so many of their children should then be red-haired, so many wise, so many stupid, — and this, with uninspiring unifortuity, they are. Aside, however, from this massing of cumulative evidence for the general theory of heredity, Dr. Woods takes up several rather practical matters. It appears, among other things, that mental and moral inheritance is nearly always of the alternate, rather than of the blended type. The child is not a mixture of ancestral qualities, but tends definitely to follow one ancestor or another; different elements of strength or weakness hang together, and there is a close association between mental and moral gifts. Especially noteworthy, in view of recent discussions, is the evidence that neither the surroundings of royalty, nor the inbreeding of royal families, nor any other environmental factor, is a cause of degeneration. The sound stocks, Saxe-Coburg, Nassau, Hohenzollern, remain sound indefinitely; degeneration appears only with Hapsburg and Bourbon blood. Nurture, surroundings, formal education, all the sources to which we look for the improvement of individuals and mankind, turn out, in the case of these royal persons, to be negligible matters. They are what they are born, — and so, according to the small group of students to which Dr. Woods belongs, are all the rest of us.

So far, then, as we all, plants, animals, and men, are in the same evolutionary boat, we may count on Dr. Woods’s side two books on the improvement of vegetable races. Mr. Harwood 14 is anything but scientific; but his picture of the achievements of Mr. Luther Burbank impresses the reader, as no scientific treatise could, with the astonishing command over their material now possessed by breeders of animals and plants. Nevertheless, Air. Burbank is by no means the thaumaturgist that his admirer makes him out to be. Unquestionably, he is one of the dozen great plant-breeders of the world, but he has outstripped his fellows, partly from the large scale on which he has been able to work, partly because of the favorable conditions that surround him, but chiefly because, within the last few years, thanks to men like De Vries and Mendel and Pearson and Galton, there has been developed for the first time a sound, detailed, workable theory of organic evolution. Burbanking is, then, only applied Darwinism.

Of all this Mr. Harwood knows nothing: for such matters one must turn to Professor Bailey,15 who gives a remarkably simple and readable account of current practice in this department of horticulture, interpreting every process in the light of recent theory. For one who already knows something of garden plants Plant Breeding affords a royal road to modern evolutionary doctrine, while the changes in the text between the first and the present fourth edition show how rapid has been recent progress in this field.

Three different authors, then, point out the only means by which any permanent improvement in any race of living things has everyet been brought about. Among them there should be opportunity for diverse philanthropic persons to get some sort of hint why their human thorns and thistles, for all their watering and digging about, still fail to bear them grapes and figs.

It has long been one of the anomalies of natural science that it always tends to begin with remote matters, and thence by slow stages to approach the more familiar. Astronomy is one of the oldest sciences, psychology one of the latest. The moon was mapped before the earth, and helium was first discovered in the sun. Only of late years has science begun to close in on its final problem,—the nature of that mind which for Dr. Woods is part of each man’s ancestral inheritance, and for Sir Oliver Lodge one of the two or three ultimate realities of the universe. Men had numbered the stars, and weighed the earth in a balance, before they so much as suspected the existence of the submerged nine-tenths of their own inner lives.

Two professional psychologists and one physician discuss from different points of view the problem of the subconsciousness; and among them give a pretty complete general account of that strange other self which remembers when we forget, takes care of us when we are absentminded, wakens us at an assigned hour in the morning, or reminds us, when we are snugly tucked away for the night, that we have neglected to lock the cellar door. The fact that the subconsciousness is subconscious makes it one of the most difficult of all subjects of study — and one of the most enticing. Professor Jastrow’s 16 interest is in the every-day experiences of normal men. He is always the practical Westerner, the teacher of college classes, for whom the abnormal and the uncanny serve but to explain the commonplace. Of the three, he discusses most completely psychological theory, and taxes most severely the voluntary attention of his reader. Professor Hyslop,17 on the other hand, carries the abnormal over into the occult; his concern is with unexplained mysteries and strange power of the human mind not dreamed of in most of our philosophies. Both men deal with the same vague region of the soul, both on occasion rely upon the same detailed evidence; but where one is interested in dreams that take their shape from sense impressions, the other is concerned with dreams that come true. The two authors, therefore, supplement each other. The one sets forth in order recent conquests of science, the other affords glimpses of fields yet to be won.

Nothing, however, in Professor Hyslop’s crystal visions, apparitions, clairvoyances, is one half so weird or gruesome as is Professor Jastrow’s all-toobrief account of the four Miss Beauchamps, who had only one body among them, and had to pin notes on the wall to explain to the partner whose turn came next the situation in which the common organism found itself. It is an unadventurous reader of the tantalizing summary who will rest content until he gets his hands on the complete description.

For some half-dozen years Dr. Morton Prince has been reporting special aspects of an extraordinary ease of multiple personality in one of his patients. The complete account18 fully bears out the promise of the preliminary reports, and it looks as if the nervous collapse of an unhappy girl is to do as much to illumine the dark places of the human mind as the bullet wound in the stomach of Alexis St. Martin did, once upon a time, for the mysteries of digestion. Cases of disintegrated personality are not especially uncommon. No case, however, has been so carefully studied under so favorable conditions. Few have been in themselves so remarkable, few have lent themselves so readily to experiment, in none has so able and well-trained an intelligence in the subject coöperated with the investigator.

For the student of psychology and for the general reader alike, the most interesting figure of Dr Prince’s book, and the most bewildering of the sisters, is the inimitable “Sally.” Sally began life as Miss Beauchamp’s subconsciousness in the days when there was only one Miss Beauchamp,—a subconsciousness, it appears, hardly more discrete than that of any normal but absent-minded and moony person who needs the special care of the inner guardian. One can imagine a sleepwalker articulating one dream with the next, and acting them all out, until the dream life acquires a certain continuity of its own, independent of the waking self and unknown by it. Some such sort of a dream-personality was Sally. But Sally dreamed so much, and did so many things in her sleep, that she gradually built up a tissue of memories and a personality of her own. Finally, in spite of Dr. Prince’s care, Sally secured control of the entire motor apparatus, pulled her eyes open with her fingers, and became a living soul. As co-consciousness, Sally took entire charge of the bodily machinery, while the dominant consciousness lapsed into a trance state, living her own life for days at a time, or alternating every few minutes with one of the other personalities. As subconsciousness she maintained the continuity of her own mental life, and knew the minds of her sisters from the inside.

In this lay Dr. Prince’s unique opportunity. Other hysterical young women have seen visions and dreamed vericidal dreams; other physicians confronted with obsessions, hallucinations, trances, automatic writings, have made more or less plausible guesses with regard to the psychology of their patients. Dr. Prince did not guess, — he asked Sally. Now Sally was a clever girl, and became in time a very fair psychologist. Once interested in her own case, she not only submitted to cross-examination, but attacked the problem on her own account, and made important contributions to its solution. Automatic writing, for example, is not uncommon in normal persons; but when Miss Beauchamp wrote automatically it was Sally who controlled the writing hand, so that experiments could be arranged with Sally in advance, and any obscure points referred to her for explanation. So, too, with almost the entire range of abnormal mental phenomena: Sally, as subconsciousness, learned to produce most of these at will, and later, as the dominant self, to account for them. There is, therefore, nothing especially new about this famous case, for each single feature has been duplicated many times. But where other investigators have tapped the subconscious life by way of vague hypnotic states, Dr, Prince has had the aid of an alert and self-conscious, if somewhat irresponsible, intelligence.

A strange book is this of Dr. Prince’s, aside from its revelation of the hidden things of the soul. To begin with, it is skillfully written, largely as a biography, but composed in no small part of the letters of the four sisters to one another and to other persons, together with verbatim reports of their conversations with the medical adviser and father-confessor of them all. If ever there were a farce-tragedy, this is it. The four sisters take turns at controlling the single body which they share, each living her own life at cross purposes with the rest, and each likely to be switched out at any moment, like a lamp, for another to take up the life that she lays down, as one who wakes from sleep; while the bewildered physician vainly hunts through the medley for the real Miss Beauchamp. Sally lays claim to twenty years continuous existence; Christine is sufficiently real to get through college and make a living for herself, only in the end to be puffed out like a candle, that the true self, lapsed since girlhood, might come to her own again. If The Dissociation of a Personality were a work of the imagination, it would be a noteworthy production. That it is, instead, the latest word of science concerning the human soul shows how far we have traveled from the indivisible Ego our fathers. The reader who chances make it his introduction to modern psychology, who has never heard of Charcot and Janet, and the Salpêtrière, of Ansel Bourne and Rev. Thomas C. Hanna, will never be the same reader again: a sadder and a wiser man will rise the morrow morn.

  1. Radio-activity. By E. RUTHERFORD, D. Sc., F. R. S., etc. New York : The Macmillan Co. Second edition, 1905.↩
  2. The New Knowledge: A Popular Account of the New Physics and the New Chemistry in their relation to the New Theory of Matter. By ROBERT KENNEDY DUNCAN. New York: A. S. Barnes & Co. 1905.↩
  3. The Dynamics of Living Matter. By JACQUES LOEB. New York : The Columbia University Press, The Macmillan Co., Agents. 1906.↩
  4. Plant Response as a Means of Physiological Investigation. By JAGADIS CHUNDER BOSE, A. M., D. Sc. New York : Longmans, Green, & Co. 1906.↩
  5. The Nature and Origin of Living Matter. By H. CARLTON BASTIAN, M. A., M. D., F. R. S., F. L. S., etc. Philadelphia: The J. B. Lippincott Co. 1905.↩
  6. The Origin of Life : Its Physical Basis and Definition. By JOHN BUTLER BURKE. New York: Frederick A, Stokes Co. 1906.↩
  7. Life and Matter : A Criticism of Professor Haeckel’s “ Riddle of the Universe.” By Sir OLIVER LODGE. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. 1905.↩
  8. Physiological Economy in Nutrition. By RUSSELL H. CHITTENDEN. New York: The Frederick A. Stokes Co. 1905.↩
  9. Published under various titles.↩
  10. Humaniculture. By HUBERT HIGGINS. New York: The Frederick A. Stokes Co. 1906.↩
  11. Nature and Health : A Popular Treatise of the Hygiene of the Person and the Home. By EDWARD CURTIS, A. M., M. D. New York : Henry Holt & Co. 1906.↩
  12. Strength and Diet: A Practical Treatise with Special Regard to the Life of Nations. By the Hon. R. RUSSELL. New York : Longmans, Green & Co. 1905.↩
  13. Mental and Moral Heredity in Royalty : A Statistical Study in History and Psychology. By FREDERICK ADAMS WOODS, M. D. New York : Henry Holt & Co. 1906.↩
  14. New Creations in Plant Life : An Authoritative Account of the Life and Work of Luther Burbank. By W. S. HARWOOD. New York : The Macmillan Co. 1905.↩
  15. Plant Breeding : Being Six Lectures upon the Amelioration of Domestic Plants. By L. H. BAILEY. New York : The Macmillan Co. 1906.↩
  16. The Subconscious. By JOSEPH JASTROW. Boston and New York : Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1906.↩
  17. Enigmas of Psychical Research. By JAMES H. HYSLOP, Ph. D., LL.D. Boston : Herbert B. Turner & Co. 1906.↩
  18. The Dissociation of a Personality : A Biographical Study in Abnormal Psychology. By MORTON PRINCE, M. D. New York : Longmans, Green & Co. 1906.↩