Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 4 (1900).djvu/114

88 hundred and twenty-five varieties have been discovered there, sixty-seven of which are new and unknown in Europe, the native home of the species."

Perhaps, however, the most debatable proposition advanced is that human customs, morals, and religions have, "as yet, very slightly, if at all, influenced the germ-cells," and are to be considered as "acquired (somatic) characteristics," and "pre-eminently the creations of environment." As an illustration we are told—what most would explain by a totally different reason—that if "infants of a Catholic family which is descended from a long line of Catholic ancestors were to be placed and retained in a purely Mohammedan environment, heredity would carry no Christian customs, morals or religion into that environment," but that Mohammedanism would replace and prevail. We think this is a wider question than can be decided by the influence of germ-cells, and does not appertain to organic evolution at all.

The chapter on "Natural Selection" is a good résumé of the most advanced theories on the question; that on the evolution of Man required more space to bring it sufficiently in line with recent anthropology; but in all the discussions on the different phases of organic evolution many new or little-known facts are introduced.

This small volume is always suggestive, and when we cannot see our way to agree with its writer, we are at least stimulated to fresh fields of thought. In the list of "Works of Reference" which forms "Section VIII." we have been unable to find among the names of authors that of Ernst Haeckel.

is a book primarily for the sportsman who has the strength, and possesses the opportunities, to visit the wildest parts of a now unfashionable continent, for Africa and not North America is at present considered the hunter's paradise. And yet this need not be a rule made too absolute, for we read:—"There are even to-day countries, the size of small kingdoms, in British