Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 15.djvu/578

 Having given illustrations of the way Agassiz, in the heat of controversy, was led on to untenable positions so that at last he denied even the filiations of languages, Professor De Quatrefages proceeds: "Agassiz, when he had arrived at this point, must have felt that he had lost himself, and that in trying to harmonize the idea of a single human species with that of several races of distinct origin he was entering an endless labyrinth. His last work betrays the signs of this embarrassment only too clearly. It is probably in the hope of escaping from it that the author has finally even denied the existence of species. After having again rejected the criterion drawn from crossing and degrees of fertility, he adds: 'With it disappears in its turn the pretended reality of species as opposed to the mode of existence of genera, families, orders, classes, and branches. Reality of existence is in fact possessed by individuals alone.' Thus from adhering solely to morphology from a disregard of the physiological side of the question, from having allowed themselves to be guided by a logic which is only founded upon incomplete data, Agassiz and Darwin have arrived at a similar result. Both have disregarded this great fact intelligible to common sense, demonstrated by science, and which governs everything in zoölogy as it does in botany, the division, namely, of organized beings into elementary and fundamental groups which propagate in space and time. But Darwin, starting from the phenomena of variations which are presented by these beings, considers species only as races. Agassiz, entirely preoccupied with the phenomena of fixity, finally considers individuals only as existing in living nature."

This is the proper place to suggest that De Quatrefages himself is perhaps open to criticism from the point of view of studies that disturb the judgment. While there is force in the point he makes against Darwinism, that natural selection is insufficient to account for evolution, the same thing is pointed out by eminent evolutionists, and Darwin himself has admitted that he at first made too much of the principle. De Quatrefages makes the common mistake of considering Darwinism and evolution as the same thing. We should say that the logical fault of De Quatrefages is that he does not allow sufficient weight to that already overwhelming consensus of proofs, and which is every day becoming stronger, that evolution is a great fact of nature, which must be accepted in its interpretation whatever outstanding difficulties remain yet to be cleared up.

Book V., on the "Peopling of the Globe," deals with the interesting subject of the migration of populations by sea and land. Book VI. takes up the "Acclimatization of the Human Species," and deals with the influence of conditions on life and race. Book VII. discusses "Primitive Man—Formation of the Human Races." In Book VIII. four interesting chapters are given to "Fossil Human Races." Book IX. considers the "Physical Characters of Present Human Races," anatomical, physiological, and pathological. Book X. closes the work by an "Analysis of the Psychological Characters of the Human Species," including its intellectual, moral, and religious characters.

To those in want of a well-digested summary of anthropological science, done in a most readable form, this volume may be freely commended.

seems a very well-digested compilation of a large amount of useful information upon a subject of much technical interest and importance. Coal has already come into so extensive use as a source of heat, both for warmth in private houses and as a motive power in manufactures, and its consumption for these ends is certain to be so greatly increased in future, that the question of the best methods of using it, in various circumstances, in order to make its force more perfectly available, is one of much practical moment. It is a subject well fit to be treated separately, and Mr. Barr's volume goes over it in a quite detailed and ample way. No better idea of the fullness of the work can be gained than by giving an inventory of its