In so far as Butler treats the first contention, his book is even today of value. He describes the pre-Darwinian theories of evolution, especially those of Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, and he strives to show that their explanations or provisional explanations were sometimes more near the truth than was Darwin's over-emphasis upon the struggle for existence as the controlling factor in the evolution of species. Butler's own point of view is that evolution takes place in accordance with a design, and it is this part of his book that will be of least importance at the present day. He quotes Paley, the celebrated English theologian and advocate of the deified architect idea of God, to show that animal organisms do show evidences of what is, strictly speaking, design, and which cannot be referred to the ordinary Darwinian explanations. Butler differs from Paley, however, in placing the designer not outside the cosmic flux of his working materials, but within the organism. Not God, he says, but the ancestral memory of man is the designer. The individual perishes, but his memory endures in his offspring and alters them in accordance with the lessons of ancestral experience. We have said that this is the least valuable part of the book, and it is so for the reason that later biologists and philosophers with the biological approach have considerably enlarged the field of speculation in this particular realm. The theory of "entelechies" of Hans Driesch practically does for organisms what Butler does in his idea of unconscious memory. On the other hand, the new "imminent teleology" of Bergson gives us a new angle on the whole question of design in nature. At the same time, however, the majority of biologists are harking back to a conception of evolution as a kind of mathematical proposition in which all is given to start with, and in which the new is neither a new design nor a spontaneous creation, but is simply a liberation from inhibition of what was always implicit in the old. And the men of this school would never consent to write a book like this of Butler's. "To the seed pan and the incubator" is their cry. The time is not here when synthesis is either advisable or even possible, they tell us. And until we hear further from these modern experimenters the wise man will read Butler for his history and prospective,--and for his humor,--but will not be guided by his theories, which are the work, indeed, of a brilliant intellect, but one working without our new data, and without experimental backing. Of course, the style of the book is delightful, and all who enjoy controversy and the play of dialectic should read it. Another class to whom it can be recommended is that large class of people who accept their view of evolution in the same spirit that an old lady accepts the Episcopalian creed and are twice as dogmatic over it. ILLIAM DHONE.