Nobel Prize Winners in Chemistry: 1901-1950 by Eduard FarberReview by: Roger AdamsThe Scientific Monthly, Vol. 79, No. 5 (Nov., 1954), pp. 333-334Published by: American Association for the Advancement of ScienceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/21521 .

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criminal law, however rationalized, is at root emotional, aggressive, and passionate.

The conclusion therefore imposes itself upon us that the psychological, affective motivations in favor of punishment are the very same as the ones which lead men to commit a transgression of the law.

If this is so, and if psychology can delineate for us the rational from the instinctual motivations for punish- ment, I predict that lawyers will be as willing as the rest of men to concentrate on therapeutic treatment of the convicted, leaving to God, who alone rightfully claims it, the vengeance.

DAVID W. LOUISELL School of Law, University of Minnesota

Causality in Natural Science. Victor F. Lenzen. Thomas, Springfield, Ill., 1954. vii + 1212 pp. $3.

THIS little volume exemplifies a scientist's ap- proach to a philosophical question. To ask "What

is x?" from a scientist's point of view is to initiate a search for instances where x becomes manifest and to try to find what those instances have in common. When x stands for "causality," the manifestations are seen to be certain attitudes that men have toward events. Ac- cordingly the first task is to list and classify those attitudes. Lenzen does this by describing the various frameworks of thought into which men's conceptions of the world have been cast: animism, organismic meta- physics, mechanistic metaphysics, positivism, and mod- ern operationalism. He illustrates his descriptions by pertinent expositions of the corresponding highlights of philosophy, for example, Aristotle's classification of causes, the inductive schemes of Francis Bacon and J. S. Mill, Kant's apriorism, Hume's skeptical criticism of causal necessity, the "anti-metaphysical" formalism of Appell and Mach, Poincare's conventionalism, and the operational analysis of concepts, which has become the philosophical backbone of modern natural science.

It appears to the reader of Lenzen's book (and justly so) that to talk about causality in natural science is to talk about the philosophy of natural science. This is true because much of natural science has to do with questions which, translated into the vernacular, begin with "Why . . . ," and because the philosophy of natural science is concerned with deciding what sorts of answers are admissible.

The philosophy of science is a very large subject, and its treatment within 100 pages must necessarily be sketchy. Still the meat of the subject is there, at least inasmuch as it concerns the now closed field of clas- sical mechanics and the very much open fields of relativity and quanta. There is also a chapter on biology in which the author discusses the question of reducibility of biological phenomena to physicochemical ones and introduces the reader to some methods of mathematical biology. The shift from deterministic to probabilistic conceptions of causality is touched upon in connection with Mendelian genetics, statistical me- chanics, and the indeterminacy of subatomic events.

In my opinion, the philosophical importance of this reorientation warrants a more extensive discussion, even within the modest scope that the author set for him- self.

Lenzen's command of his subject matter is beyond question. It is somewhat difficult, however, to determine in what context the subject matter is treated, especially since a preface is lacking. The book is identified on the flyleaf as a Monograph in American Lectures in Phi- losophy. As a review monograph or an encyclopedic entry, the book certainly fulfills its function. However, if it is addressed to an audience, one may wonder to what audience it is addressed. Beyond the first four chapters, it says little to either the "intelligent layman" or the philosopher who is not rather thoroughly familiar with advanced physics. The author refers to the most profound notions of mathematical physics simply by name. Statements like "The principle of causality for relativistic field theory is a consequence of the mathe- matical theory of hyperbolic differential equations" (p. 80) or "radiations within an enclosure may be denoted by the phase assembly of photons which obey the Bose-Einstein statistics" (p. 86) can be properly addressed only to a physicist. An equation like

pq-qp-=h 2ari

(p. 93) looks senseless to anyone who tries to interpret it in terms of conventional algebra.

If the book is admittedly written for physical sci- entists, then the question arises how much it can tell them that they do not know. The question is put here sincerely and not at all rhetorically. Since not many physical scientists are articulate about the philosophical foundations of their disciplines, it is anybody's guess how many of them are aware of the framework of thought that underlies their lifework and of how this framework came into being. Certainly this awareness is highly desirable. If there are many physical scientists who lack it, and if it can be inculcated by the extremely condensed exposition followed by the author, then the book is entirely justified.

ANATOL RAPOPORT Committee on Mathematical Biology, University of Chicago

Nobel Prize Winners in Chemistry: 1901-1950. Eduard Farber. Schuman, New York, 1953. x + 219 pp. Plates. $5. S INCE the creation of the Nobel Foundation in

1901 to the end of 1950, 53 chemists have received Nobel prizes. The achievements of these men represent a series of major discoveries in chemistry in the 20th century. The author has written three sections about each prize winner. The first is a condensed biographical sketch which includes not merely a chronology of edu- cation and professional positions, but also the origin of the interest and conditions for the achievement of each individual. Then follows a selection from the prize-

November 1995495

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winner's description of his work, taken most frequently from the lecture delivered upon' his acceptance of the prize. A third section entitled "Consequences in theory and practice" indicates the influence of the discovery, whether of very broad scope and providing a new base for chemical thinking, or more narrow and leading to the solution of a definite practical problem.

The book is instructive, stimulating, and interesting. It provides the reader with a collection of short stories about great events in chemistry during the past 50 years, and a description of the brilliant personalities from which the discoveries originated. No chemical library should be without it.

ROGER ADAM S Department of Chemistry, Universit)y of Illinois

Know Your Reader. The scientific approach to reada- bility. George R. Klare and Byron Buck. Hermitage House, New York, 1954. 192 pp. $2.95.

A CORDING to the authors, "The purpose of this book is to provide writers with information that

will help them to communicate." The information pro- vided is essentially that sentences should usually be short, long words are to be avoided, and the reader should be personally involved whenever possible. All this may be determined by "scientific readability" tests, one of which provides us with the information that cer- tain movie and confession magazines "could be read by 80 percent of the adult population." It is admitted, of course, that these readability formulas cannot do every- thing: "While the New Yorker rates highly readable by readability formulas, its appeal to readers is in great part the result of style aspects that readability formulas don't get at."

As one of the 20 percent who find the movie and confession things unreadable, and as one who is bored by the New Yorker's grade 7.7 chi-chi approach to cosmic problems (see the 7 April 1954 issue of Punch, please!), I rise to protest that if this is the sort of thing that readability formulas inspire, we would be better off without them. When we remember that this is sup- posed to be a book for professional writers, we realize that the style is both atrocious and in bad taste. It is full of chummy contractions, irritating inversions, and unnecessary words. The authors (who recommend Fowler's English Usage), evidently consider their effort to be an example of "readability." Sentences like this are all too common: "Related to a reader's background and interest is his purpose in reading." "Now there's still another way, but it's easy to run afoul on." "Much more important, though, we feel, is to say that every writer should care."

After such gems, it is consoling to find this conces- sion: "Even future formulas, which may well consider some of the present immeasurables, will never take the art out of writing." Amen.

JOEL W. HEDGPETH

Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, California

A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe. Roger Tory Peterson, Guy Mountfort, and P. A. D. Hollom. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1954. xxxiv +318 pp. Illus. + plates. $5. R OGER TORY PETERSON is widely known for

his bird paintings and for his guides (similar to this) to North American birds, and all the 1107 illustra- tions (publisher's count; Julian Huxley, in the introduc- tion, says "more than 1200") and the explanatory page accompanying each plate are his work, while Mount- fort and Hollom, each prominent and authoritative as a British bird student, provided the descriptive text, and the maps and distribution notes, respectively. All three have studied birds on extensive travels in Europe. Mountfort lived on the Continent for 10 years. Orni- thologists from most European countries and the United States gave "particular assistance."

The book follows the well-known Peterson plan. Each plate shows a number of birds, brought together with their similarities in mind, drawn to the same scale and in the same attitude, with markers indicating their chief identifying characteristics, which are explained further but briefly on the page facing the plate. These excellent plates show nearly all species "in full colour," but many species appear in black and white too, in other attitudes, such as flying. End-paper drawings are of "Roadside silhouettes" and "Flight silhouettes." Two improvements over the American Field Guides are the frequent, additional, miniature pictures, in silhouette to show attitudes, in color to show color patterns as seen in flight, and the maps that show both the wintering and breeding ranges, in Europe, of 367 species.

The descriptive text gives the name of each species in several languages, including the North American, when one occurs on both sides of the Atlantic but has different names, as Sand Martin and Bank Swallow. (We call the Arctic Skua the Parasitic Jaeger, not "Arctic Jaegar," and the misprint in this error is very nearly the only one I find in the book.) The identifying characteristics (including flight, attitudes, and so forth, even nests, when helpful) are enlarged on, careful com- parisons with similar species are made, and there are brief descriptions of calls, songs, and habitats. (Fuller accounts elsewhere do not say the Alpine swift uses mud in its nest.)

All the 452 species of Europe to about 30?E are treated thus fully, including vagrants such as the Ameri- can robin. There are also briefer descriptions, without pictures, of 100 species of accidentals, "which have been recorded fewer than 20 times." (Better call Apus affinis the house swift, as in Asia, rather than "White-rumped swift," the official name in Africa of Apus ca?fer, in America of Aeronautes saxatilis. Our olive-backed thrush is brownish olive, not "grey-brown" unless badly worn.)

A fully illustrated chapter on "How to identify birds" is for beginners. There is a list of the 452 species on which you may check those you see on your next trip, and a list of the principal British ornithological societies, with addresses. It would have been well to mention that at least in England there are many local

334 THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY

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