23 DECEMBER 1932, Page 23

A PICTURE BOOK OF EVOLUTION By Surgeon Rear-Admiral C. M.

Beadnell

The author of this book (C. A. Watts, 10s. 6d.) has made an honest and diffident but not altogether hapuoiattempt to re-write and bring up to date Dennis Hitrd's of the same title. Though one would gather from the title and part of the text that it was designed for intelligent children, yet long and frequent sections could only be appreciated by students of some experience. While the latter, for instance, scarcely need pictures of early and later bicycles to illustrate the principle of evolution, children and even educated grown-ups will be rather overawed by an unexplained reference to the "supra- orbital ridges" of the apes. This disparity is even more marked in the illustrations, some of which tell their story most attractively, while others are of the forbidding, semi- diagrammatic type found in text-books. Perhaps, however, the author was unduly cramped by his loyalty to Hird. The chromosome numbers for man and mouse are both incorrect— the reviewer has not checked the others given—and it is difficult to understand why no attempt is made to correlate this subject with Mendelism, without which it has little significance. Altogether, the handling of heredity and variation is unsatisfactory. The only reference, indeed, to Mendelism is a brief one under " Mendel " in the "Who's Who" at the end of the book. The last is an excellent feature, but why should it include a journalist, a politician, and a popular novelist as workers on evolution and omit such names as Bateson, Crew, Fisher, Gates, Haldane, Hurst, T. H. Morgan, Punnett, and many more ?