by James W. Alexander, D. D. New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, No. 530 Broadway, 1859.
Such is the wording of this title that it received the indorsement of no less an authority than Dr. Alexander, and the "introductory
James Lawrence Cabell.
notice" is full of the highest praise of the work and of its leading idea.
Americans may well be proud of this book, as it states many of the biological laws now recognized, and, strange to say, cites many of the very instances used later by Huxley and Darwin to support them. Among these we find, on page 22, that by changing food and environment, "we may modify to an extent sometimes quite considerable the outward structural character of many plants and low animal organisms; and these newly acquired characters may then be perpetuated by hereditary transmission, under the influence of the law of assimilation between parent and offspring, even though the causes which originally determined the variation from the primi-
