. A Lot of Learning

Introductions to Modern Knowledge. Nos. 1 to 12. Edited by F. B. Kirkman. (Routledge. 6d. each.) How often we have regretted the great days of the Quarterlies ! There was no branch of contemporary knowledge, it seems, on which they were not competent to touch ; they touched nothing without making their readers feel that the last word on the subject had now been said. And if any omnivorous reader still doubted whether he was an fait with the whole territory of learning, he could turn himself loose in those vast Libraries of Entertaining Knowledge, Cyclopaedias of Travel, and Select Extracts on Everything.

But in our own degenerate days, we seem at last to have discovered a good substitute for the Quarterly article. It is the sixpenny pamphlet. Messrs. Routledge have come forward with a series of Introductions to Modern Knowledge. The titles are judiciously chosen ; the writers authoritative ; the production capable and neat. We are not able to give an extended review to all of the volumes ; but out of the

early numbers we should like to commend a few which seem to us unusually good.

In What Darwin Really Said, Professor Julian Huxley has selected the most crucial extracts from the Origin of Species and has bound them together with a commentary

of his own. Darwin is always pleasant to read. His style was concrete and firm. He presented us much more with an exploration of nature than with the dogmatic assertions which came to be typical of evolutionary polemics. In these chapters we can read Darwin's own expression of his views

on the struggle for existence, natural selection and the laws of variation. They are enlivened by the examples quoted

of inter-relation in nature. There is, for instance, the famous observation of Colonel Newman : cats eat mice : mice eat bees : bees fertilize clover. Where cats are few, clover will tend to die out.

"It is well known," said the king of Rabbah, speaking of Europeans, "that in their own country they eat black men and dye red cloth with their blood " : a remark which seems to show that misunderstandings between primitives and Europeans are not altogether one-sided. In The Savage as He Really Is, Mr. J. H. Driberg occupies himself with proving that there is no such difference between primitives and Europeans as we often assume. In particular he brings evidence from his own observations to show that if we under-

stand the conditions of life under which primitives live, their interests, and the categories of thought which they find

useful, we shall see that they are every bit as logical as our- selves. The question, as Mr. Driberg says, is of more than academic importance :— "If we persist in the belief that the savage is an irrational creature and that his institutions are valueless because they are unlike our own, no amount of good will and sympathy will make our administration acceptable to him."

Savages are, as he shows, capable of very complicated processes of reason where their interests are involved ; and he suggests that the difference between savage and European is no more a difference of kind than the difference between the country- bred and the town-bred.

The great and unusual virtue of Miss Susan Isaacs' short guide-book to The Nursery Years is that its advice is definite and practicable. It is extremely rare to find a volume on child-psychology which is so full of instances, common difficulties and detailed recommendations. The attitude Miss Isaacs displays is " modern " ; as we perceive in her Don'ts for Parents : "Don't interrupt anything the child is doing without giving him fair notice " ; "Don't merely say, 'You mustn't do that' if you can possibly add but you may do this ' " ; "Don't show your love by con- stantly caressing the child, but by providing for his interests."

This is a book to recommend to all parents who are at the beginning of their tasks or in the middle of them.

Usually it is the foreign visitors to England who speak most flatteringly of our English qualities. Mr. H. W.

Nevinson, however, gives a superbly generous account of his fellow-citizens in his pamphlet, The English. The most

he finds to say against his countrymen is that in England working men do not always keep their appointments. He describes us as kindly, modest, polite and adaptable. He acquits us of those old charges of hypocrisy and lack of artistic taste

A silent delight in beauty of sound, form, movement and natural scenery is present in all classes, and among those who have enjoyed the rare privilege of fairly easy lives and fairly good education, it finds expression in imaginative works of the highest kind, whether in verse or prose, architecture or painting."

It will be useful for future historians to have this evidence that Utopias are not altogether visionary ; that one, at least, has been known to exist, and has been acknowledged as such by its own citizens.

Where Mr. Nevinson is describing rather than valuing our traditions and customs he is vivid and sensitive. Perhaps we have overstated his optimism. He recognizes abuses, he draws attention to problems, and his very suavity may be more forcible than indignation. We come away from reading his study with the feeling that we are a very decent set of fellows, and that, if there are slums, or industrial conflicts, or troubles with native races, they are not beyond amendment.