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bien pensant authors write slender books ; Victorian readers could afford thick volumes of leisurely chatter and complacent display of solemn platitudes. To revive Whewell by a full reprint of his collected works is a misuse of the technical progress that makes such reprints so easy nowadays, a misuse only aggravated by including them among "classics of science".

For the historian of science, they have only the value of testimonies to the kind of ideology inculcated to the studious youth destined to occupy key positions in church and state, a t a time when science appeared as a new, potentially dangerous social force that had to be tamed and harnessed. Whewell was the man destined to fulfil this task and, served by uncommon erudition and a shrewd turn of mind, he went about it with unsparing thoroughness. His industry, however, was not matched by his perspicacity. To realize how little he was actually au fait of the new trends of scientific thought, it will be sufficient to notice that such a fundamental idea as that of the correlation of the forces of nature was beyond his horizon. In fact, the scientific outlook he discusses a t immoderate length was that following directly from Newton's work-carefully pruned, of course, of the epis- temological innovations to which it gave rise under Locke's inspiration. He is also a t pains to refute his French rival Auguste Comte, like himself erudite and shortsighted, but able at least to interpret the evolution of human thinking with an untrammelled mind. L. ROSENEELD

BERTALANFFY'S PSYCHOLOGY Robots, Men and Minds Psychology in the Modern World. By Ludwig von Bertalanffy. Pp. x + 150. (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1967.) $5. THIS short book can be cordially recommended to students of psychology and psychiatry and also to those of their elders who, like me, have long been intrigued by the name of von Bertalanffy, without knowing exactly what he stands for. Such ignorance will certainly be dispelled by reading its lively text, which is interspersed a t fre- quent intervals with citations from the author's publica- tions over the past forty-four years. I t is a very personal book, and the personality which permeates it is not a particularly winning one: there is a constant strain of self-congratulation, coupled with an unconcealed resent- ment at the failure of the world of science to accord him the recognition which he feels he deserves. The author is clearly erudite, cultivated and brilliant; and yet every now and again he reveals a glimpse of the least attractive type of Teutonic authoritarianism-for example, in his unbridled scorn for beatniks, "unbearable" children, and "teenagers who do not know their mother tongue when entering college but are glued to the television screen for five hours a day"; and in his patronizing praise for an existentialist work by Simone de Beauvoir, "little as I like de Beauvoir's more sexy publications". Some readers may find him personally uncongenial; but none will find him dull. Throughout his life he seems to have been communing, both literally and in the realms of ideas, with many of the most original thinkers of our time. Both in his text, and in a long series of notes to the text, he succinctly presents (and frequently challenges) the ideas of men as diverse as Claude Bernard, Freud, Lorenz, Whitehead, and Toynbee, to name only a few.

His prime purpose, however, is to present an epitome of his own ideas; and these are full of interest. A dis- tinguished biologist, he has fought a long guerilla warfare against the tyranny of inappropriate mechanistic thinking in the life sciences. He views cybernetics as the first major departure from the conceptual scheme of traditional physics, but believes that cybernetic models still cannot

do full justice to the phenomena of living organisms, and particularly not to those involving symbol systems, as in human behaviour.

"Physical processes follow the second law of thenno- dynamics which prescribes that they proceed towards increasing entropy. . . . But living systems apparently do exactly the opposite. In spite of irreversible processes continually going on, they tend to maintain an organized state of fantastic improbability; they are maintained in states of non-equilibrium; they even develop towards increasingly improbable states, increasing differentiation and order, as is manifest both in the individual develop- ment of an organism and in evolution from the famous amoeba to man".

The complexities of living organisms, especially the higher organisms, are such that, in his opinion, we need a conceptual approach as radically different from classical physics as was the Galilean from the Copernican view of the universe. He believes that in general systems theory we have the beginnings of such a new theoretical scheme, although he admits that perhaps some radically new mathematical discoveries will have to be made before this theory can be generalized to subsume all the com- plexities of living things.

In passing, von Bertalanffy executes a number of daring raids into several large topics. He rails against the "zoomorphizing" tendency of experimental psycho- logy, the robotizing effect of the "doctrine of the primary reactivity of the psychophysiological organism" ; and later he advances an alternative theory in which activity, and not reactivity, is seen as the basic characteristic of living creatures. He challenges the "random mutation" basis of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, and antici- pates a new theory emerging from recent advances in molecular biology, advances which will reintroduce tele- ology into the evolutionary process. He points out that perception has been found to be not merely a response of the organism to external stimuli which impinge on it from the external world, but an active, selective process on the part of the organism itself. This leads to a recon- sideration of the mind-body problem on lines reminiscent of Heisenberg's theory of complementary systems, which leads to the interesting suggestion that this problem is an attribute of the urnwelt (or species-specific experience of the ambient reality, as described by von Uexkiill) peculiar to human beings. This calls in turn for a new epistem- ology, in which an absolutistic is replaced by a perspective philosophy.

Not surprisingly, sociology also lends itself to analysis in terms of general systems theory: "Sociolo~v is the study of soc&l systems, whatever their exact Ydkfkition may be". In this last phrase lies the weakness of his whole argument; because we are continually being asked to take on trust the claim that some day, in the future, the general theory of multiple interactions in open systems will be capable of actual application to biological, social and psychological events of extraordinary complexity. The author is well aware that he may be accused of being metaphysical, vitalistic, anti-scientific; but he insists that throughout his life he has been simply opposing the intrusion of pseudoscientific ways of thinking into fields of human experience where they do not belong. His aim, in contrast, has been to contribute towards the human- izing of science. G. M. CARSTAIRS

EARLY MAN IN THE ARCTIC Ancient Men of the Arctic By J. Louis Giddings. Pp. xxxi + 391 + xv. (London: Secker and Warburg, 1967.) 84s. net.

THIS book belongs to a genre increasingly popular in the United States, that of a personalized anecdotal account

NATURE. VOL. 218. JUNE 1. 1968

of serious archaeological work, a genre which reflects the need for readers more numerous than those likely to be closely interested in a straightforward account in scientific language. Once the main thread has been gained-and here the introduction by Henry B. Collins will be found to be of great help-the more specialized reader wishing to extract information rapidly will find little trouble; to anyone with more leisure there is the reward of making acquaintance with the a.ttractive personality of the author cut short tragically on the highway, a man of personal modesty but of outstanding achievement in his chosen field of research.

It is interesting to recall that archaeology has been seriously applied to the study of early human settlement in the Arctic territories for less than half a century. Before this, attempts were made by such men as Henry Rink, Franz Boas and H. P. Steensby to reconstruct the antecedents of the Eskimo by means of inference from the ethnographic present. The first attempt to establish the early history of settlement in the northern territories of the Old World by direct archaeological investigation was made by the Fifth Thule Expedition to North Canada between 1921-24, an expedition mounted from Greenland and conducted by Therkel Mathiassen and Kaj Birkett- Smith. The most important outcome of this was the discovery in the north-west Hudson Bay region of a well- defined forerunner of recent Eskimo culture, termed the Thule culture.

The opening up of north-west Alaska as a field of archaeological excavation began a new era in palaeo- Eskimo research. I n this respect the discovery by the joint Danisli-American expedition led by Helge Larsen and Froelich Rainey in 1939 of the distinctive Ipiutak culture stratigraphically below a western outlier of the Thule culture marked a decisive advance. This expedition was decisive in another aspect because i t was as a junior member charged with responsibility for obtaining samples for tree-ring analysis that J. Louis Giddings gained his first experience of the territory where in due course he was to widen so notably the range of man's history in the Arctic.

Giddings made his first break-through in 1948 with the excavation of the Iyatayet site a t Cape Denbigh on the southern shore of the Seward Peninsula. The dis- covery underneath an Eskimo house dated since A.D. 1600 of a distinctive assemblage, to some extent recalling early Ipiutak and which Giddings termed Norton, was locally important, but the revelation in the basal horizon of what came to be termed the Denbigh culture began a new chapter in Arctic research. The combination of a micro- core and blade technique, burins and bifacially flaked projectile heads pointed to the Old World, notably to Siberia, and gave excavators in the New World a new objective. Industries of basically Denbigh character have indeed since been found in northern Canada from the Firth River to the Igulik area of the north-east, to the Arctic archipelago and even in Pearyland in the extreme north of Greenland. In Alaska itself the dating of the Denbigh horizon by radiocarbon analysis to the period c. 2500-3500 B.C. stimulated research both on the inter- mediate stages of culture and on the period between the full development of Denbigh and the presumed passage of the hunting people whose Clovis projectile points were being lost on the High Plains of the United States as early as the ninth millennium B.C. The first gap has been filled in part by straightforward vertical stratigraphy, but in part also by Giddings's masterly investigation of the series of more than a hundred strand-lines on Cape Krusenstern north of Kotzebue Sound. The earliest of these, most remote from the present coast, yielded sites of successive phases of Denbigh culture, and the youngest, immediately behind the modern beaches, settlements of the western Thule. On intermediate beaches, Giddings with great persistence confirmed the sequence of Ipiutak and Norton cultures and revealed a new Choris stage

dating from around 1000 B.C. and corresponding to a level previously found in the Trail Creek caves by Helge Larsen between Ipiutak and Denbigh levels, as well as occupation dating from around 1800 B.C. and attributed by him to an Old Whaling group.

The research on which Giddings was engaged a t the time of his death was an attempt to detect phases of settlement antecedent to the fully fledged Denbigh. Already, on what proved to be his last expedition, he had an extremely promising stratigraphical sequence on Onion Portage on the Kobuk River. At this locality the material from a succession of deposits underlying a well- defined Denbigh horizon yielded a number of traits first encountered by archaeologists in the New World in the context of this culture; the micro-blades and micro-cores from the seventh and lowermost layer so far explored a t Onion Portage give evidence of a tradition, previously known from the campus of the University of Alaska, from the Aleutian Islands and from Japan itself.

Dr Giddings in his lifetime opened up a field of pre- historic research in north-western Alaska of key impor- tance to students of early man in the Arctic. It is good to know that further work was projected and has indeed already been carried out. No better introduction to what is involved could be provided than this amply illustrated and well-indexed book. GRAHAME CLARK

PIGEONS AND DOVES Pigeons and Doves of the World By Derek Goodwin. (Publication No. 663.) Pp. vi + 446 + 3 plates. (London: British Museum (Natural History), 1967.) 1269. THE Columbidae are indeed a family of birds that have inherited the Earth, flourishing in all but the highest latitudes and on some of the most remote islands of the globe as well as on all the continents. The proliferation of species from Indonesia eastwards is especially remark- able; and, as the author remarks, this success is the more so because the Colimbidae have the smallest clutches among land-birds-two eggs or only one, nearly all of them have weak bills and nearly all are attractive to predators through their bulk and their succulence.

The author has special qualScations for writing this comprehensive review, because not only is he working in the British Museum (Natural History), but he also has a strong personal commitment to this group of birds. I t dates from his early childhood, since when he has taken every opportunity to study them alive and has published a number of papers on them. The result is an authoritative study written with agreeable personal touches. It is, too, delightfully free of pretentiousness and jargon ("edifi- carian" is an unaccountable lapse); but it must be noted that the book swells the high proportion of our present-day publications of which the proof-reading could have been better.

The account of each species is accompanied by a distribution map and usually also by a line drawing of the bird by Robert Gillmor, who contributes also three coloured plates. All available information-and the literature has been meticulously ransacked-is given about the variation within each species, its distribution and habitat, characters in the field, and every aspect of its biology. Here we see how much remains to be learned. Again and again we come against the blank wall of "no information"; this applies even to the nesting of a Jamaican species. Nor is there unlimited time; several species, such as those of the Bonin Islands and of the Mascarenes, have gone for ever and others are on their way.

The first fifty pages of the book are devoted to general topics, including a brief exposition of the taxonomic system very helpful to the layman. The topics include