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stone. But he does not state whether he ascertained that the keeper had or had not instructed it in this use of the most primitive form of hammer. Darwin himself had a chimpanzee acquaintance which threw things at him. A monkey's aptness in imitation would fully account for this, without invoking any recondite psychic faculties. And then he refers to the elephants breaking branches from the trees and using them as fly-whisks. Unquestionably they are used with this effect; Darwin does not closely examine the evidence of their being used with this design-which is the point that makes the difference. elephant will break off a branch, with the object of browsing on the leaves, whether there be flies annoying him or whether there be not. Then, having the bough conveniently in his trunk, the waving of the bough would disperse the flies effectively enough, but just how much, if any, of a fly dispersive purpose was in the elephant's mind would need a good deal more observation to determine than seems to have been given to the problem. The case has to be left with an open verdict of "not proven." And so it is with every case before the court in which the primates or any of the lower animals are witnesses, with the single exception of that in which this solitary wasp of the Sphex family, cited by the Peckhams, appears. It is confirmed by a precedent, in which another member of the same family is the witness, and these two instances, both supplied by insects of closely related species, are the only two that I know, really well attested, of any other creature than man using, of his own initiative, any kind of tool.

The way of these wasps, in the conduct of their domestic business, is this: the mother wasp digs a tunnel in the ground; in this tunnel she deposits a caterpillar, stung either to

death or to a condition of paralysis; within the same tunnel she then lays an egg, so that when the grub hatches out from the egg it finds itself in a nursery which is at the same time a fatly stocked larder. It feeds on the interned caterpillar until it is of years of discretion to pass into the stage of pupa, and thence into that of the perfect winged insect, when it will dig itself out and will complete the cycle of the life-story of its kind by operations modeled with much exactness on those of its parents. When the wasp has made its tunnel, put in the grub, and so on, it finishes off by ramming down pellets of earth, little. stones, and so forth on the outlet of the tunnel-"putting the lid on" the whole. This is the race habit of the wasps; and once upon a time it happened to the Peckhams, watching one of them at work, to observe the following most remarkable departure, on the part of an exceptional individual from the habit of its kind: "When, at last, the filling was level with the ground, she (the wasp) brought a quantity of fine grains of dirt to the spot, and, picking up a small pebble in her mandibles, used it as a hammer in pounding them down with rapid strokes, thus making this spot as firm and hard as the surrounding surface." She departed, brought more dirt, picked up the pebble again, and used it as a hammer, as before. In all the wide range of their experience the Peckhams, most careful and industrious observers, had never seen the like, nor, so far as I can learn, did they ever see it again, though they studied scores and scores of the same and of allied species making their tunnels and filling them. But when they published their story, then they were surprised to find it corroborated by the observation of a Doctor Williston, of Kansas University. Apparently it had taken him a year to pluck up

sufficient courage to publish the account of what he had seen-a happening practically identical with that which the Peckhams saw-because he deemed it so unlikely to be believed.

We are obliged, then, to accept the conclusion that occasionally individuals of the Ammophila kind really are toolusers, employing stones as hammers. We should notice that it is part of their race habit to thrust down into the tunnel, by way of top filling, pellets and pebbles. From this it may seem a very short step to beating down with a pebble the pellets already in; it is perhaps only carrying the race habit a little farther; it is an act which the normal habit seems easily to suggest. The Westminster Gazette.

But, argue it how we may, we have to confess that we have here the beginning of tool-using-the use of a hammer. And the use of a hammer seems an advance, having a greater appearance of intelligence than the mere use of an anvil. We have the anvil use in the habit of our own familiar thrush bringing its snails to a certain convenient stone on which it will crack their shells by beating them upon it. The sea-birds which carry shell-fish to a height and drop them on the rocks to break the shells are similarly anvilworkers, only using the force of gravity in lieu of the thrush's muscles. But these are tricks which would be learned by very simple associations. Horace Hutchinson.

BOOKS AND AUTHORS.

Rev. J. A. Zahm's book "Great Inspirers" (D. Appleton & Co.) derives its title, not from the two great characters, St. Jerome and Dante Alighieri, whose careers and whose influence in religion and literature it describes, but upon the womenPaula and Eustochium in the one instance and Beatrice in the otherwho inspired and helped to shape their life work. It was their communion with these pure and devoted women, Dr. Zahm believes, "that unlocked the brains and hearts of Jerome and Dante and made them both immortal," and he uses them as illustrations and proofs of what he holds to be widely true that it is the influence and inspiration of noble women that help men to their highest achievements.

In a small volume entitled "Jesus for the Men of Today" (George H. Doran Co.), Dr. George Holley Gilbert tries to make the personality of Jesus more real and vital to the modern man. As the author explains

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in his brief introduction, the book is not intended for the desk of the student who seeks the doctrines which have grown around the person and the work of Jesus, or the detailed results of modern Biblical investigation, but is meant to "mediate between dim and alien past and the living present, between a past that was religious but unscientific and a present that exalts science to the seat of religion." The successive chapters trace the career of Jesus from His youth at the carpenter's bench to His death upon the cross, with the aim, consistently maintained, of presenting Jesus as He seemed to the men of His time.

"My Mother and I," by E. G. Stern (The Macmillan Co.), is an intimate and touching story of a young girl who came to this country as a baby with her family, from a little town in Russian Poland; lived in the ghetto of an American city; wrote Yiddish letters for immigrant neighbors, in her

childhood; went to school and became more and more American in her hopes and aspirations; gained a scholarship and through it an entrance to college; and later married a classmate and entered upon a happy and broadening life. The pathos of the story lies in the growing separation of mother and daughter, at first everything to each other and the mother unfaltering in her devotion, but the gulf between them inevitably widening as the mother remained inextricably attached to the old order and the old associations while the daughter's horizon was expanding, and new friends, new ideals, and new possibilities were entering into her life. Writing of herself and others like herself, the daughter says: "When I think of them lecturing on the platform, teaching in schools and colleges, prescribing in offices, pleading before the bar of law, I shall never be able to see them standing alone. I shall always see, behind them, two shadowy figures who will stand with questioning, puzzled eyes, eyes in which there will be love, but no understanding, and always an infinite loneliness." The story ends this pathetic and tender note, and it is impossible to believe that any element of fiction enters into it. Every page of it is a transcript from life.

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The most interesting part of Patrick MacGill's "Soldiers' Songs" is the preface. He digs rather deep into the subject and exhibits a few of the ditties now floating through the trenches "somewhere in France." One of these, in most reprehensible French, has a swing and a naivete that must give it a life similar to that of "John Brown's Body" and other familiar sing-songs of our own Civil War. Mr. MacGill attempts to copy the diction, and the

spirit of these songs. He succeeds measurably but has not yet reached the liveliness of those in his preface. His "Dugout Proverbs" have a jaunty air: Your dugout took you hours to build. Got broken in a minute!

A rotten shame! Be thankful, son, your carcass isn't in it.

E. P. Dutton & Co.

The American public has come to look at the annual anthology of the free-verse-fiers as an interesting event. The title this year is the same as formerly, but for the date: "Some Imagist Poets, 1917." The contributors are Richard Aldington, H. D., John Gould Fletcher, F. S. Flint, and Amy Lowell. Of these all are up to their usual level save the last. Amy Lowell has apparently grown weary with her venture or her company, for her thumb-nail sketches from Japan and China are below her recent work. She stumbles at times into flat prose without the ghost of a rhythm. Miss Lowell attached with a lilting cadence generally. As good as any is her:

Cold wet leaves

Floating on moss-colored water,
And the croaking of frogs-
Cracked bell-notes in the twilight.

H. D. flings higher than that; his "Eurydice," the wail of a soul slung back to Hell, is poignant, haunting:

Fringe upon fringe

of blue crocuses,

crocuses, walled against blue of themselves

blue of the upper earth,

blue of the depth upon depth of flowerslost!

As prose, chopped up into unequal lines and surging with such melody as Pater put into his without the choppingup, this poetry has a swing to it.

Houghton Mifflin Co.

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