fully be overpowered by the national authority, that fact would at once re-clothe them with all their rights. Congress could prescribe no conditions, because this would be to recognize the states as territories, and violate the principle of state rights. This view made our war for the Union flagrantly unconstitutional; for if the crime of treason was "individual," and could only be treated “individually," the Federal government had no right to hold prisoners of war, seize property, and capture and confiscate vessels; for every rebel was in the full legal possession of his political rights, and could only be prevented from exercising them through a judicial conviction of treason in the district in which the overt act was committed.

Mr. Scott misconceives the character of the plan of reconstruction he so earnestly condemns. While it does not recognize the revolted districts or states in the Union, it deals with their people as subject to the authority of the United States. As citizens of the United States, they could no more escape their obligations than they could run away from their own shadows. Through their treason and rebellion they lost their rights under the Union, but the Union lost none of its rights over them. They did not and could not destroy the Union, or even abandon it, but simply forfeited their rights under it and thus subjected themselves to the coercive authority of the nation. When they ceased to be a mere mob, and became public enemies, this fact did not, as Mr. Scott supposes, "do away with their character as criminals and render punishment after subjection out of the question," because the law of nations determines the rights of nations in such cases, and one of these rights is the right of selfpreservation.

We admit that if the rebellion had been nipped in the bud, or had been abandoned before it assumed its gigantic proportions, no reconstruction of the government would have been necessary. The punishment of the leaders might have been demanded, but nothing else would have been required but the return of the people in revolt to their allegiance. But when the conflict ceased to be any longer a mere insurrection against the national authority, and took upon itself the character of a war with a foreign power, as the Supreme Court of the United States decided, the insurgents became public enemies, and when conquered were the conquered enemies of the United States and subject to the power of the conqueror, according to the laws of war applicable to such a con

flict. The nation had the right to prescribe just such conditions as it saw fit, looking to indemnity for the past and security for the future. In doing this it violated no article or clause of the Constitution, but was governed by the laws of war recognized by all civilized governments, and by the Constitution itself. Nobody violated it but the parties who defied its authority and compelled the nation to defend itself against the attempt upon its own life. To argue that the men who carried on this work of devastation for four years in the name of State Rights should be allowed at the end of the conflict to set up State Rights as a bar to their accountability and a reason for their unconditional restoration to power, was a mockery of justice and an affront to common sense.

It is perhaps superfluous to say that the bias of this volume is Southern. This is shown in the author's treatment of the Missouri Compromise, of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798-9, and the question of Reconstruction. The work, however, is written in a spirit of fairness, giving the argument on both sides of important questions, and thus helping the reader to a just conclusion. It will serve a good purpose in the political education of the people. GEORGE W. JULIAN.

THE PROCESSES OF CELL-LIFE.* Professor Patrick Geddes has lately proposed the name Bionomics to designate what has been vaguely termed the science of organic evolution. In this sense, Bionomics would be the science which treats of the changes and adaptations in living beings, and the laws that govern them. This term Bionomics seems to me a very desirable one, and the science which it covers is one that draws material from every conceivable source of human knowledge. The fact that all our knowledge is human, and must, if expressed at all, be stated in terms of human experience, brings all of it into some bionomic relation. The central question in Bionomics is that of the ancestry of the various groups, and the influences which have caused them to become what they are. The central idea in the study is that of life-adaptation; and no influ

*AN ATLAS OF THE FERTILIZATION and KARYOKINESIS OF THE OVUM. By Edmund B. Wilson, Ph.D., Professor of Invertebrate Zoölogy in Columbia College; with the coöperation of Edward Leaming, M. D., F. R. P.S., Instructor in Photography at the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia College. New York: Published for the Columbia University Press by Macmillan & Co.

For the last fifteen years the most fruitful line of research in the whole range of Bionomics has been that of the life processes of the cell, collectively known as Karyokinesis, and in the relation of the cell-structures and functions to the laws of heredity. For the last fifty years, since the discoveries of Schleiden and Schwann of the cellular structure of animals (1846), it has been recognized that the bodies of the higher animals, or metazoa, may be considered each as a colony or alliance of one-celled animals. These are bound together in relations of mutual help and mutual dependence. This alliance permits growth and specialization, increase in size and strength with a physiological division of labor among the different parts, each organ being made of coördinate cells gathered together into tissues. From each of these organized beings or aggregations of cells, single cells are thrown off for purposes of reproduction. These germ-cells (ovum, spermatozoön) are in origin and nature similar to the tissue cells of which the body is composed. Each, again, is essentially similar to the onecelled organisms, or Protozoa, the supposed ancestors of the many-celled types. The manycelled body is derived from the ovum by a series of successive divisions, or cleavages; the eggcell dividing into two, four, eight, and so on, until a very large number of cells is produced. These remain together, building up tissues and organs, until a period of maturity of the compound structure is reached. Then other germcells are detached, which pass through similar cycles of growth. Among the descendants of each egg-cell, as stated by Professor Wilson, 66 a certain number assume the character of the original egg-cell, are converted into ova, and thus form the point of departure for the following generation. Every egg is therefore derived by a continuous and unbroken series of celldivisions from the egg of the preceding generation, and so on backward through all preceding generations; it is normally destined to form the first term in the series of cell-divisions extending indefinitely forward into the future."

In this point of view, the egg and the compound individual into which it develops stand each as a link in an unbroken chain of life, extending backward to life's beginning, whatever that may have been. For as each living egg-cell is cast off from living cell-structures by processes of life, death has nowhere intervened in any series which is now extant. These

chains of life tend to diverge, one from another; while the destruction of those links in the chain of organisms not fitted to the conditions of life tends by exclusion toward the perpetuation of those better adapted.

In some low types, the egg is capable of celldivision and growth (Parthenogenesis) without the addition of the male element. Cross-fertilization (Amphimisis) with its mixture of hereditary materials derived from different sources, is so useful in evolution that it has virtually superseded Parthenogesis. Its importance lies in this: that it is the chief factor in promoting individual variation. Through the survival of favorable variations result higher adaptation and specialization. In most compound animals, the egg is incapable of division or cleavage until it has been fertilized by a germ-cell of the opposite sex, similarly derived from the tissues of a living body. Fundamentally, the egg and sperm-cell are alike in origin and character, and each bears the same relation to the phenomena of heredity. The ovum, by processes of adaptation, has become in the higher forms immovable, and charged with food substance. The sperm-cell is active, and carries only its hereditary material and the protoplasm necessary to its motion and main

tenance.

All cells, whether germ-cells or not, consist, omitting minor details, of protoplasm and nucleus. In the protoplasm-a network of jellylike substance in a fluid - the actions of celllife take place; while the nucleus, itself inert, presides over or directs the results of these actions. Both Protoplasm and Nucleus are elaborate structures, not mere chemical compounds, and in each the function depends upon structure and not on chemical composition. In the loops and bands of the chromatin, the essential part of the nucleus, rests in some way the plan of the growing organism, the ancestral directive force, according to which the organism must develop. In each case of celldivision, an elaborate mechanism (centrosome, asters, etc.) is developed in the protoplasm, by means of which the chromatin is subdivided, each of its elaborate loops and tangles being equally shared between the two daughter cells formed by self-cleavage. By this means each resultant cell is like its mother cell in essential respects. But again, as an absolutely equal division is unknown in nature, each daughtercell has in some minute degree its own peculiarities, its own individuality, apparently resulting from inequalities in the chromatin.

These individual qualities, hidden in the determining chromatin, will reappear in the compound animal or individual into which the germ-cell develops.

When the egg or sperm cell is mature and ready for fertilization, it differs from the ordinary cells from which it is derived by containing only half the usual amount of chromatin or hereditary material. It is, therefore, so far as heredity goes, a half-cell, containing only half the architect's plan, or hereditary directive force, according to which its development is to be governed. The process of fertilization is the union of two half-cells, by which each half contributes its share of hereditary material. These become mingled together in the nucleus of the fertilized ovum, or cleavage-cell. This is then a new individual, and in its development it proceeds along the lines indicated by the mixed chromatin, and the forces of heredity somehow resident in this. This mixture of characters shows itself in the resultant individual. In this sense, the individual begins life as a mosaic of ancestral fragments, diverse and sometimes contradictory as to details, with a fundamental basis of unity in the traits of species and race which have come down from many ancestors unchanged, and changeable only by very slow accretions or modifications.

Professor Edmund B. Wilson has rendered a great service to teachers and students in the publication of the splendid series of microphotographs of these different processes. Hitherto the student has had access only to descriptions and diagrams. The latter are always too explicit for his best uses, inasmuch as they go beyond nature to someone's theory of what nature should be. In the forty photographic plates in Professor Wilson's atlas, all phases of changes in the ovum are shown as they appear in fact, with only the small source of error arising from the processes of staining. These are accompanied by an admirably lucid text with many diagrammatic figures explanatory of the plates. DAVID STARR JORDAN.

FOLK SONGS AND STORIES OF THE
BAHAMAS.*

To expect the American Folk-Lore Society to actually maintain the high standard set by its first memoir would be unreasonable; and it is not unkind criticism to say of its third vol

BAHAMA SONGS AND STORIES. A Contribution to Folklore. By Charles L. Edwards. Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society, No. III. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

ume, "Bahama Songs and Stories," that it is not at all the equal of Heli Chatelain's "Angola Tales." It is, however, an interesting and valuable contribution to folk-lore.

The lovely Bahamas are, strangely, but little known. They comprise more than three thousand islands, most of which are very small. The Main Island is from fifty to one hundred miles long and from one to ten miles wide, with little hills that rise to one hundred feet in height covered with pine-trees of great size. Seaward from it are the cays, a chain of islets, repetitions in miniature of the main island, with smaller hills and stunted growth of shrubs and little trees, and with cocoa palms. Beyond them lies the reef. Island, cays, reef, all are coralline in origin. Color abounds everywhere: the vegetation is intensely green, the sea deeply blue, the coral sand dazzling white. And here there lives a curious population, pretty equally composed of blacks and whites, with the former slowly but constantly gaining. Thus our author describes the land and the people. After a brief but helpful sketch of their life and their ways, he presents their songs and their stories,

songs and stories of negroes, negroes speaking English, but English of a quaint cockney sort, quite unlike the dialects among our Southern negroes. Funny indeed is it to find these descendants of Africans dropping and misplacing their h as if London born and bred. “Hall right, 'e 'as 'is 'ogs 'ere," would be quite a possible sentence among the Jamaica blacks. And their "vwas," "vw'en," "vwalk" are quite Wellerian.

Of songs, our author has collected forty specimens, presenting music with the words. All of the pieces are religious in sentiment, more or less sombre in sentiment and rendition, more or less grotesque in form and verbal content. Common among these negroes is the practice of sitting up all night to sing, the occasion being either joyous or doleful. Mr. Edwards describes the service of song"Held on the night when some friend is supposed to be dying. If the patient does not die, they come again the next night, and between the disease and the hymns the poor negro is pretty sure to succumb. The singers, men, women, and children, sit around on the floor of the larger room of the hut and stand outside at the doors and windows, while the invalid lies upon the floor in the smaller room. Long into the night they sing their most mournful hymns and anthems,' and only in the light of dawn do those who are left as chief mourners silently disperse. . . . Each one of the dusky group, as if by intuition, takes some part in the melody and the blending of all tone colors in the soprano, tenor, alto, and bass, without reference to the fixed laws of har

mony, makes such peculiarly touching music as I have never heard elsewhere."

In an appendix upon Negro Music the author brings together a considerable amount of data and presents a bibliography of the subject. Thirty-eight Bahama stories are given. Many of them are very imperfect in sense and disjointed in structure. This may be the result of the fact that children, and not adults, are the usual narrators. There are two kinds of tales recognized, "old stories" and "fairy stories." The former are chiefly animal tales, analogous to the "Br'er Rabbit" stories of "Uncle Remus." The latter are chiefly of recent introduction from English sources. Rather curious is the variability of dialect; the same word may be quite differently pronounced in successive sentences. The stories usually begin and end with some set formula. The opening is generally:

"Once it vwas a time, a very good time,

De monkey chewed tobacco an' 'e spit white lime." To which may be added:

"Twa'nt my time, 't wa'nt you time; 't was old folks' time." The ending generally is:

"E bo ban, my story's en';

If you doan believe my story's true Hax my captain an' my crew.

Vw'en I die, bury me in a pot o' candle grease." The three first lines are fixed; the fourth varies. Space does not permit a detailed study of the stories. The variant of the "Tar Baby story is curious. So is Story XX., where we have "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" done into Bahama. "Big Claus and Little Claus " is terribly mangled, but has a quaint and original termination. Most of the fairy stories have peculiarly tragic terminations. As a sample of dialect and of the old stories, we cite B'Helephant an' B’Vw’ale":

66

"Now dis day B'Rabby vwas walkin' 'long de shore. 'E see B'Vw'ale. 'E say, 'B'Vw'ale!' B'Vw'ale say, Hey! B'Rabby say, 'B'Vw'ale, I bet I could pull you on de shore!' B'Vw'ale say, 'You cahnt!' B'Rabby say, 'I bet you t'ree t'ousan' dollar!' B'Vw'ale say, 'Hall right!' 'E gone."

Brother Rabbit goes to find Brother Elephant, and makes a similar bet with him. Then, securing a strong rope, he succeeds in setting them against each other, both of them thinking that they are pulling against him. The rope breaks.

"B'Vw'ale went in de ocean and B'Helephant vwent vay over in de pine-yard. Das v'y you see B'Vw'ale in de ocean to-day, and das vy you see B'Helephant over in de pine bushes to-day." FREDERICK STARR.

EURIPIDES THE RATIONALIST.*

Naturally, a new book from Professor Verrall is suggestive, stimulating, compelling reluctant assent at times, as often, again, He writes, as arousing eager opposition. usual, to break with accepted beliefs, and upon a question well worthy of discussion. That the present essay, "Euripides the Rationalist," is particularly fragmentary, and anything but final, its author would probably be the first to declare. Still, every real student of Greek drama - indeed, every serious student of litershould turn its leaves.

ature

ness.

It is universally conceded that Euripides' plots have nearly all a serious structural weakDoubtless every reader since Aristophanes has objected particularly to the long explanatory prologues, and to the spectacular finale wherein the "god from the machine" cuts the knot which the dramatist, or his characters, failed to untie through the natural inevitable progress of the action. It has been noted, often, that these divine apparitions are much less vigorous and realistic than the human characters. It was not left for Mr. Verrall first to point out, either, that all the men and women in, for instance, the "Hippolytos" are heroic, while all the divinities are ignoble. That such a drama seems a covert but deliberate attack upon the very existence of the popular gods, has also been often remarked.

Euripides was certainly not in personal nor artistic harmony with the popular theology of his time. He was forced into outward con

formity with it by the whole environment, the traditions, the limited materials of his art. Compared with his greatest rivals, he was a realist, yet was obliged to accept the machinery of romance: or, as Mr. Verrall would say, an earnest atheist, he was compelled to respect the conventions of a pulpit! But Mr. Verrall advances far beyond these secure positions, and plants his standard boldly, declaring that Euripides used the drama chiefly, and persisall belief in myth and miracle, in the inspiratently, for this one purpose of breaking down and Athena. tion of Delphi, in the very existence of Apollo

Mr. Verrall applies his tests, in detail, only to three plays altogether: The "Alcestis," the "Ion," the "Iphigenia in Tauris." In general, he attempts to divide each drama into a central

* EURIPIDES THE RationalisT. A Study in the History of Art and Religion. By A. W. Verrall. New York: Macmillan & Co.

plot, wherein purely human motives and actions leave no room for the marvellous, and a tableau before, or after, or both, which satisfied the popular conservatism, while at the same time impressing upon every thoughtful mind the helplessness, the dishonesty, the unreality, of the people's gods. As to the "Ion," Mr. Verrall in 1890 worked out this theory much more fully, in an annotated edition and translation. Here he seems to the present reader to have an unanswerable argument in the main. Apollo is indeed a shameApollo is indeed a shame faced and baffled liar at the end of the play, a brutal libertine from the beginning. Here, certainly, Euripides hardly retains any pretense of belief at all. His spectacular Pallas, at the close, only silences for the instant, at best, the voice of common-sense and right impulse. Apollo himself fails to appear, and no serious attempt is made to excuse his absence or his previous behavior.

Yet even here Mr. Verrall seems over ingenious in his detailed reconstruction of what Euripides, as he thinks, meant to show us really took place. Still less can we promptly agree that Alcestis evidently fainted only, from hysterical excitement, under the delusion of a doom appointed her. Heracles, to Mr. Verrall, is but a drunken braggart, who, entering the tomb, found the lady awake, and escorted her quietly back to the palace. If this were all quite evident, it should have been evident long ago. Milton, for instance, should have seen. that "sad Electra's poet," he who brought back "Alcestis from the grave," was but a scoffer! We are not quite willing, then, to have our poet's consistency, his single-minded devotion to a cause, defended at such a terrible cost. We do not believe the creative imagination, the artistic delight in his work, could coëxist so long in Euripides with pure scientific agnosticism. Disbelief, to be inculcated by "innuendo" (Mr. Verrall's favorite word), corrodes the soul itself, as examples like Lucian, Voltaire, and Swift remind us.

But we think Mr. Verrall will be compelled - by compulsion from within at least to apply his method to the whole list of extant plays, or at any rate to most of them. The study will be by no means barren, even if the final verdict on the main question be "Not proven," or even "Not probable." Especially interesting are his sketches of the many-minded keen-witted critical audience to which Euripides appealed, the reminders that the poet was not merely heard once, but read and dis

cussed all the year round,-in general, the attempt to reconstruct the fifth century Athenian conditions. For all the imagination, the literary taste, the open-mindedness of Mr. Verrall, classical scholarship has abundant cause for gratitude.

Like his rival in iconoclasm, the German Wilamowitz, Mr. Verrall often sallies into the field before his forces are quite assembled and fully under control. Thus, a straggling argument on page 172 tells us "the Medea was one of a group which gained not only a prize, but the first." In our meagre and fragmentary knowledge on such matters, hardly any one fact is more interesting than that in the historic year 431 B.C. Eschylus' son, the heir of his art, was placed first, Sophocles second, while Euripides with the Medea took the third or "booby" prize!

Professor Verrall's style is not so clear, bright, and graceful as Mr. Jebb's; and the subtlety of his arguments makes this doubly apparent. "No one who is accustomed to literary composition will doubt that the Phoemissæ did not originally conclude with the departure of Edipus," etc. (p. 242). Everyone accustomed to literary composition will see clearly that the third negative bewilders nearly every mind.

Lastly, hasty readers may be warned that the general thesis will be found in the preface, while the final summing-up is on pp. 259-60, attached, perhaps by accident, to a very ingenious brief essay which has little essential bearing on the rest of the book. At any rate, these last paragraphs should be marked off as Epilogue. WILLIAM C. LAWTON.

CHRIST AS DOCTRINE AND PERSON.*

A dogmatic rendering of the work of Christ more or less interferes with a vital rendering of his words. It is not easy to look upon the atonement as a dis

* JESUS AS A TEACHER, and the Making of the New Testament. By B. A. Hinsdale. St. Louis: Christian Publishing Co.

CHRIST'S IDEA OF THE SUPERNATURAL. By John H. Denison. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

STUDIES IN THEOLOGIC DEFINITION, Underlying the Apostles and Nicene Creeds. By Frederic Palmer. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.

THE CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS. Its Relation to Evolution. By J. S. Black. Boston: Lee & Shepard.

THE PREACHER AND HIS PLACE. The Lyman Beecher Lectures on Preaching. By David H. Greer, D.D. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

COLLEGE SERMONS. By the late Benjamin Jowett, M.A. Edited by the Very Rev. the Hon. W. H. Fremantle, M.A. New York: Macmillan & Co.