Jump to content

Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 42.djvu/141

From Wikisource
This page has been validated.
LITERARY NOTICES.
131

forbid its citizens to buy their goods in the cheapest markets. It is because he finds every argument used by the advocates of the American system in 1884, borrowed from the speeches of the parliamentary orators in 1844, that he concludes the principles of both systems are the same, and hence they must be beneficial or injurious to one country as well as to the other. To keep the volume abreast of the debate in this country, it has been revised, and enough additional facts and arguments interwoven throughout the historical portions sufficient to make it a good campaign document. The historical portion of the book is rather well condensed from the more elaborate histories of free trade published in the Cobden Club Series and pamphlets, and it appears, upon the whole, fair and impartial. The book seems especially opportune whichever partisan reads, because logically the historical résumé comes before the actual discussion of free trade versus protection. Otherwise, how could we intelligently understand what was done, why it was done, and the circumstances which lead through so fierce a contest up to the final accomplishment? There is an excellent index, so necessary to a book of this character.

An Introduction to General Logic. By E. E. Constance Jones. London and New York: Longmans, Green & Co. Pp. 283. Price, $1.50.

The author's purpose in preparing this work has been to provide a First Logic Book which, besides being useful in teaching beginners, may furnish a brief, connected sketch of the science, and he hopes that what he has to say may help to remove certain difficulties familiar to all teachers of logic, which have forcibly pressed themselves upon his attention in his own teaching. He here sets forth, as simply and systematically as possible, views indicated in a small book of Notes on Difficult Points in Logic which he had previously written, in which he discussed fully the cases in which he diverged from traditional doctrines, and his reasons for the divergence. He regards his scheme as following naturally from the view taken of the twofold character of terms, which, as names of things, have both application and signification. On this datum, together with the recognition that things have a plurality of characteristics and a consequent plurality of names, depends the possibility of significant assertion and the whole doctrine of inference. The principle of excluded middle suggests and supports a recognition of the relatedness of things to one another; and a consideration of Bacon's doctrine of form suggests a modification of Mill's view of induction. The relation of induction to deduction appears to be so close that it is more convenient to regard all logic as one than to make a radical and fundamental division between deductive or formal and inductive or material logic. Upon the twofold character of terms, again, depends the recognition of the law of identity as a law of identity in diversity. The author believes that his views about relative propositions, quantification, disjunctives, the force and interdependence of the principles of logic, the systematization of fallacies, and, partly, the elaboration of immediate inferences, are to some extent new.

Darwin and after Darwin. By George John Romanes. Vol. I. The Darwinian Theory. Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company. Pp. 476. Price, $2.

In the volume now before us Mr. Romanes gives a statement of the evidence which supports Darwin's biological doctrine, leaving to a second volume the discussion of post-Darwinian questions. Taking first classification, he shows that all organic Nature readily falls into an arrangement of group subordinate to group, which is just what would have been expected on the supposition that the relationships of the various species indicate lines of descent. In the field of morphology he points out the fact that where any organ gives evidence of having been modified in a certain direction, other parts of the same organism have evidently been modified to the same extent. Here also comes in the argument from vestigial structures. Some of these vestiges can be noted only during the infancy of the species, such as the form and functions of the limbs of young children. One of the illustrations in this chapter is from a photograph taken by Dr. Louis Robinson in his recent investigations on the grasping power of infants. The arguments from embryology, paleontology, and geographical distribution follow in successive chapters. A distinct division of the volume