The Evolution of the Vertebrates and Their Kin.

Wm. Patten, Ph.D. Philadelphia: P. Blackiston's Son & Co., 1912.

In this handsome volume Professor Patten, who is now on sabbatical leave of absence, cruising at present among the islands of the Pacific in quest of new facts and materials for biological investigation, presents the fruits of nearly twenty-five years of thoughtful research. Here he has brought together many facts and ideas that he has discussed heretofore in special papers; but in this book these ideas are greatly amplified and extended, and expressed in more graphic, readable style than is commonly in vogue in special scientific communications.

Professor Patten at present stands almost alone in advocating the probability of the evolution of the great subkingdom of animals with a backbone, viz., the Vertebrates, of which man is the most gifted representative, out of the humble group ,of Arachnids, which includes the spider, the scorpion, and the king-crab. These, by the way, he derives in turn from the simpler Crustacea, the clan of which the crab and lobster are conspicuous members.

He has now worked out with infinite patience and great skill the structure of the "missing link" in this part of the chain, viz., a tribe of fish-like animals clad in coats of mail and called Ostracoderms. These prehistoric creatures, of which there is a notable collection made by Professor Patten on exhibition in Butterfield Museum, he believes to have been neither wholly bug nor wholly fish, yet both combined—the link between the lowly invertebrate, which carries its spinal cord prone against the earth as it goes about its daily duties, and the vertebrate that carries this important feature of its nervous system within its back.

Other biologists have believed that Vertebrates might trace their ancestry back to the jointed worms, like the angle-worm, but that page upon page of this genealogy has been blotted out hopelessly. Professor Patten not only regards the jointed worms as entirely off the main line of descent, but he revises the whole zoological family tree, as it is viewed by most zoologists of today, in a manner not only original, but even revolutionary.

The work is a handsomely printed octavo volume of nearly 500 pages, illustrated by many figures which are largely original, or from the author's own previous publications, and drawn with his usual artistic skill. J. H. G.

Mat hew Carey, Editor, Author, andPublisher: a study in American literary development. By Earl L. Bradsher, Ph.D. The Columbia Press, New York, 1912. (Doctor Bradsher is a member of the department of English at Dartmouth.)

Between the subject of this volume and his namesake of a preceding century, Sir Lucius Cary (Lord Falkland), there are resemblances neither few nor slight. Both spent their early years in Dublin; both, though by native temper lovers of peace, became embroiled in controversial public life—indeed, one received a serious wound in a duel, the other died in battle; both espoused causes that made them of a small minority; both passed with their deaths into an obscurity which few save the scholar penetrate. These are casual resemblances-as casual as the similarity of name; but they leap into a new significance with the most desultory comparison of the two personalities. For both were of a singularly gentle make-up; of "inimitable sweetness and delight in conversation, of flowing and obliging humanity and goodness to mankind, of primitive simplicity and integrity of life." Both were wholly and dispassionately fair, liberals in the best sense; so that Mathew Carey denouncing the Irish policy of premier and Parliament and urging "immediate repeal of the whole Penal Code against the Roman Catholics," seems a reincarnation of Sir Lucius Cary exposing himself without fear to the Jesuits and commingling freely "with those of that religion, whether priests or laics." And, Falkland, though his statue guards the outer lobby of the House of Commons, is now—as he was in his own day - as truly a man without a party as Mathew Carey, whom no cis-Atlantic Hall of Fame has honored.

Of Carey, author, editor, publicist, economist, and friend to young genius, Doctor Bradsher's treatise is an account at once circumstantial and vivid. It narrates the scanty beginnings of our American literature—beginnings compassed with difficulty because of our fawning dependence upon England in matters intellectual. It traces minutely the slow rise of our material consciousness in literature, despite hardship of production and publication. It reports the international copyright war which was the genesis of our international copyright law. And it itemizes the part of Carey in each of these movements. It is a faithful record of his friendship, his rare enmities, his notable service to letters. And its sources are of more than ordinary interest—letters and documents, most of them never before published ; notably several to . and from Charles Dickens. To the close student of origins, the scholarly specialist, Doctor Bradsher's work will prove, then, not merely adequate, but absorbing.

But that is not all: to the less minute student, who views literature for its human side through reading-glass_ rath- er than miscroscope, the book will re- veal much of the man Carey. Without becoming too little a study in literary development, it manages to be suffi- ciently a study in personality. And even the lay reader will find the person- ality of Carey spacious and noble, filled with a luminous old-world gentility.

Doctor Bradsher has made his treat- ise a genuine tribute—an epitaph, not a cenotaph. R.F.

A Study of the Paragraph. By Helen Thomas, A.M., Dartmouth '11. The American Book Company, New York, Chicago., Cincinnati, 1912.

In this unassuming handbook is proposed a new and workable way to study the structure of the paragraph. Between a paragraph and a geometrical proof, Miss Thomas discovers an analogy, in which topic-sentence corresponds to theorem. The analogy, applied to several model paragraphs, serves to divide them into (1) subject proposed for proof, (2) proof itself, and (3) summary. An ingenious inversion of the formula deduced supplies an efficient laboratory method of constructing original paragraphs.

The usefulness of the book as a sup- plementary text is fortified by its great number of examples and of subjects for

composition.