DARWIN AND AFTER DARWIN.*
THAT is the title of a book by Romans: but it may serve here as a sign for a book by Adami : Medical Contributions to the Study of Evolution. The influences of Darwin, the Novum Organon which he gave to tho world, will never come to an end : all thought will be After Darwin for ever and ever. To this platitude on the doctrine of Evolution, let is add another. It is not only of ever- lasting interest : it is also of universal interest : it has its centre everywhere—may the profanity of the quotation be forgiven— and its circumference nowhere. It was omnipresent, right away, • hfediral Contributions to the Study of Evolution. By 3. G. Adam'. M.D..
F.B.C.P. Illustrated. London : Duckworth and Co. [Ma. net.] at the very beginning : it touched a thousand forms of thought and of work. One of them was the thought and work of the medical profession. Those among us who are old enough can remember the profound effect of the new learning on pathology, and on the interpretation of many facts in medical and surgical practice. Monsters, freaks, congenital deformities, vestigial bits of us, abnormal positions of normal structures, all began to have more meaning. Embryology flourished as never before : comparative anatomy took firm hold on us. Even the mysteries of heredity seemed less impenetrable.
From then to now, the medical profession, so far as it has the time and the temperament for these studies, has diligently set itself to learn the workings of Evolution in the health and the diseases of individuals, of families, and of nations. But the cares of practice forbid it from learning more than a point here and a point there : it is content with glimpses and guesses and intuitions. Besides, the mass of all that there is to be learned, with each year, becomes more vast. Indeed, the advance is wonderful, from the sort of single-handed combats which used to take place, forty years ago, in the names of " religion " and " science," over " Darwinism," to the present-day After Darwin controversies.
Dr. Adami's great book is all the more welcome. Canada took him from England, but he and his work are not forgotten over here : Cambridge and London, like Tabor and Hermon, shall rejoice in his name. It is an ambitious book : he purposes nothing loss than a full statement of the facts of health, disease, and heredity in the light of all theories of Evolution now held or disputed. The first part of the book—" Adaptation and Disease : the Contribution of Medical Research to the Study of Evolution "—is formed of the four Croonian Lectures, which he gave in London in June, 1917. These brought together and summed-up many researches which he had made during the years before the war : it was im- possible for him to make more, he was hard at administrative work for the Canadian Army Medical Service, in which he is a Lieutenant- Colonel. The second and third parts of the book, " Heredity and Adaptation," and " On Growth and Overgrowth," are formed of addresses and monographs given to Societies or published in scien- tific journals. Er. Adami is a man of amazingly wide reading. In the years before the war, it would have been possible to compliment him by saying that his erudition, his knowledge of all that every- body has ever written, could not be surpassed even in Germany. But the compliment would not have pleased him, for he has no liking for the German misuse of erudition : as he says of one German professor :- " Two years ago he entombed his findings in a huge quarto monograph of 250 pages, a superb example of everything that a monograph ought not to be—verbose, diffuse, wandering, abun- dantly polemic, wanting in anything of the nature of a table of contents, let alone an index ; in short, wholly mediaeval save for its profuse and admirable illustrations (which nevertheless are devoid of legend or key) and for the valuable facts that can be dug out of its pages."
It is Dr. Adami's besetting habit, that he cannot do without the delight of the play of words—epigrams, scores, jests, little spurts of laughter and of airy contempt : more than are to be expected, or unreservedly enjoyed, in a grave bookof science. They raise the image not merely of a bull in a china-shop, but of a whirlwind in a shop full of Venetian glass. But we snatch a fearful joy from watching him. As the man said of his hot-tempered wife, " What- ever she is, she is not dull." For instance, his wrath over Koch's mishandling of the problems of tuberculosis :-
" For twenty years or so, he laid down that the tubercle bacillus which he had discovered was identical in its properties, from what- ever animal it was isolated, whether from man, the ox, or bird ; opposing Straus and others when they called attention to the marked distinction in the properties of the human and avian types. You will remember how suddenly and dramatically he turned round at the great Tuberculosis Congress in London, announcing that the human and bovine forms of bacillus were absolutely distinct species—incidentally without any acknowledgment of the work done by American workers, Theobald Smith, Dinwiddie, and Frothingham, in establishing these differences between the two types, and incidentally, also, he being a Government servant, to the apparent material advantage of the agrarian party in Germany. . . . It has cost Great Britain alone thousands of pounds and years of work of a Royal Commission to demonstrate Koch's error."
Or, for another instance, one of his many dismissals of Weismann as an unsatisfactory theorist :-
" Before all, it is the Freiburg philosopher who has led our generation of biologists into Nephelococcygia—' Cloud Cuckoo Land.' Much as we owe to him for arresting the vague generaliza- tions upon heredity prevalent until the eighties, and for his confirmation,. experimental and otherwise, of Galton's doctrine that conditions such as mutilations and use-acquirements are not inherited, I myself am inclined to think that Weismann's teaching has, on the whole, done more harm than good. He was a pure morphologist, and his hypothesis was purely morphological. Had he been familiar with the physical chemistry of his day, he could not have ventured to publish it ; had he been a physiologist with any appreciation of function, he must have modified it extensively. It is, in short, an impossible hypothesis, and in a very extraordinary manner all its main postulates are found contrary to experience." This is grand reading for those who are sick to death of the
doctrine of the continuity of the germ-plasm. But there is a touch of risk in this style : and Dr. Adami got into trouble when he compared one of our leaders of scientific thought to a bumble-bee imprisoned in a greenhouse. But the book lives all the more, because it is not of the head only, but of the heart also.
Adaptation, self-adaptation, is his theme. The changes wrought by " Evolution" on all living things, from bacilli up to man, are not imposed upon that which is passive, but are met and used by that which is active. Even the bacilli seem, as it were, to be desiring self-improvement, and planning how to better themselves. He supports this good theme with great orderly masses of facts and arguments, observations and references, innumerable and immeasurable. To be reading him, is to be incessantly getting out of depth, and incessantly coming to the surface again : there is any amount of thoughts provided by him, even for those of us who are not learned in these matters. It is a notable book, human through and through. Time for a man to pick holes in it, when he has done with admiring and enjoying it.
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