Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 15.djvu/435

 REVIEWS 421

The City of the Dinner-Pail. By J. T. Lincoln. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1909. Pp. 186. A graceful sketch of random reflections of a sympathetic em- ployer who understands the motives of rich and poor is worth a glance. Even if there is no addition to knowledge it is something to discover a business man who can interpret the real meaning of trade unions, read the employers a lesson of patience, and keep his faith in the soundness of national life. Q R. Henderson

Mendelism. By R. C. Punnett.. Wilshire Book Co., 1909. 50 cents.

For the sociologist who has little time to enter into a detailed study of the more technical aspect of Mendelism and the theory of heredity, Mr. Punnett's little volume will prove a valuable and con- cise as well as scientifically accurate statement of the scope of this new field of biological inquiry. Those, however, who will expect to find in the volume any application of the theory to social phe- nomena will be disappointed. Mr. Wilshire, in a somewhat dis- connected preface to the book, would have us think that Mendelism is the last theory of evolution that has come to reconcile what Darwinism has left unreconciled between evolution and socialism. One fails to see the connection between the mutation theory as a factor in the creation of new species by leaps and bounds and Mendelism which so far has not ventured beyond the study of selec- tion and variation in the animal world. It must also be remem- bered that De Vries and not Mendel is the chief exponent of the mutation theory which Mr. Wilshire desires to use as a new law of nature which justifies the hope of socialists for a sudden change of the present system of society into a socialist commonwealth. Socialism may come, but Mendelism has no bearing upon it unless it be as a method of human selection which will lead toward more intelligent breeding of men. Mendelism, of all theories of evolu- tion, admits the least of the element of new characters, unless it be the result of combination of existing elements dominating over other existing elements.

The last chapter in the book, "Old Bottles," may be character- ized as an ungracious and unscientific attempt to assail Professor Thomson of England, whose only sin is scientific conservatism in a field where biology is most uncertain. Carol Aronovici