- 623 - 640 SONNICHSEN, ALBERT. Consumers' Co-operation.-J. E. Hagerty - THOMPSON, FRANK V. Schooling of the Immigrant.-Franklin Bobbitt TORELLE, ELLEN. The Political Philosophy of Robert M. LaFollette TROTTER, ELEANOR. Seventeenth-Century Life in the Country Parish.- VINOGRADOFF, SIR PAUL. Outlines of Historical Jurisprudence.- - - - WALL, O. A. Sex and Sex Worship.-R. E. Park WALLING, WILLIAM E. Sovietism.-A. W. Small WARD, HARRY FREDERICK. The Gospel for a Working World.-E. L. 783 WILLIAMS, MARY W. Social Scandinavia in the Viking Age.—A. E. Women Physicians, Proceedings of the International Conference of.- 789 WHITAKER, CHARLES H. The Joke about Housing.-Carol Aronovici WHITE, WILLIAM A. Thoughts of a Psychiatist on the War and After.- WILLIAM, MAURICE. The Social Interpretation of History.-V. E. A very spirited controversy over the relative influence of "nature and nurture" has raged through the writings of biosociologists and sociologists of the ordinary sort for so long a time that the prospect of contributing even an armful of brush to the illumination of this problem seems rather slight. There are, however, few matters of greater popular interest, and I think we may say of greater importance from the standpoint of the education of youth, than the attempt to trace the causes by which the notably successful, the notoriously unsuccessful, and the innumerable obscure come to their respective states. The orthodox biological view regarding these matters has, it should be noted, undergone a remarkable change. The older environmentalism has declined and in its place has arisen the present cult of heredity with such pessimistic implications interwoven as the degree of eugenic fervor of a given writer may lead him to venture upon. A simple statement of how this change. has come about may be in place. The Lamarckian doctrine of use and disuse, promulgated some hundred years ago, served an earlier day as a theoretical foundation for education. If use and habit could account for the evolution of organic differences in the animal world, how clear the inference that human progress likewise must flow from a training which, persisted in generation after generation, yields cumulative powers and aptitudes of the greatest advantage to posterity. There are still many individuals who receive the statement that no amount of musical, mathematical, legal, or other special training on the part of parents will improve the offspring one iota with a lingering incredulity. But the biologists gave and the biologists have taken away this illusory hope of a training which shall be cumulative. Weissmann and his school began their assaults upon this comfortable doctrine in the eighties of the last century, and today little or nothing of it remains.1 It should be clear that this earlier, pre-Darwinian conception of the effects of use and disuse laid a much greater emphasis upon environment, including training or education, than it did upon heredity, and through all the long campaign by which the Darwinian doctrine of natural selection won its way in the world of science, this supremacy of the environment was not seriously threatened. It was in fact, variability and selection, not heredity, upon which the emphasis was laid; the latter was taken more or less for granted. The variable organism in the face of a portentous environment was turned now to death, now to life, with a constant survival of individuals fit to do business under existing conditions. It is hardly necessary to point out that the general conception of organic evolution clarified by Darwin's great work, and including the idea of the struggle for existence, was eagerly appropriated by the sciences of human society. History, jurisprudence, political economy, and ethics all underwent considerable modifications "If we make a jack-o-lantern out of a pumpkin and afterwards plant the seeds, we do not expect a crop of jack-o-lanterns. Repeat the cutting and plant the seeds through fifty generations of pumpkins; not a jack-o-lantern will be grown. The inheritance is from the seed, not from the pumpkin. "The human seed is equally unaffected by externals which do not damage the germ itself. Life's experiences must be impressed anew upon every generation as it comes along, and a thousand years of external impressions will not add or subtract or improve or corrupt one hereditary characteristic in the germ plasm."-Seth K. Humphrey, Mankind, p. 12. in viewpoint and method. And of sociology it may be said that it has been extravagant in its professions of indebtedness to biology. Many absurdities in social theory have masqueraded in the borrowed trappings of biological conceptions. The so-called biological analogy is a case in point. Much more pernicious was the attempt to base an ethics of rapacity and greed upon what was ignorantly called social Darwinism. It was apparently overlooked by some of those who glorified the struggle for existence that a genuine re-enactment of Nature's plan, far from confirming satisfied classes in their hereditary possessions and privileges, would cancel at a stroke all of the rules of civilized competition, overthrow private property and stable matrimony (for neither may be said to be precisely natural in a biological sense), and bring back Chaos and old Night. The world has seen much of such ruthlessness of late in the course of the worldwar and its revolutionary sequels, but considering the world at large, there appears to be little disposition to identify the primitive with the admirable, or to regard the rule of brute force as adequate to the ethical requirements of civilization. The work of Darwin will continue for many decades to mark epochs in the history of biology. Since the publication of his Origin of Species in 1859, the most important development has been the gradual emergence of a doctrine of inheritance, and during the past dozen years certainly no influence has swept over the field of social thinking comparable with the idea of heredity. As early as 1865, in advance of the recent researches in genetics, Francis Galton, the distinguished founder of eugenics, published two articles on "Hereditary Talent and Character." His Hereditary Genius appeared in 1869, to be followed by a long list of publications in support of the general thesis that man deserves more careful breeding. The work of Weismann, whose Germplasm was published in 1885, has led at length to the almost complete overthrow of the doctrine of the inheritance of traits acquired by the individual through training or experience and has focused attention upon a new and fascinating problem-the mechanism of heredity. In |