melons. Conversation lagged, andas in a Turkish house it is not etiquette to ask after the health of the wives there was not much warmth in it. In the house of the mufti conversation was doubly hampered, as it was a little difficult to ask how the host himself was, since he happened to be in a very disagreeable place. We were told that a month before the Serbians had thrown the white-bearded, seventyyear-old Mufti Hadji Rustem Shporta into prison, and that they were going to try him on the charge of having instigated the killing of two Christian engineers.

My companion dallied in the women's quarters through the smoking of many nargile pipes, while we sat with our legs crossed and took our ease in Oriental fashion. But what was that? Was there not the rustling of women's garments in the next room? The son-in-law grew restless, and put his back closer to the door. Yes, there was a rustling of women's clothes. From afar we could even hear feminine laughter. Was there not a rustle in the walls too, and were no curious eyes surveying us through hidden peepholes in the walls? The son-in-law grew still more nervous on his carpet, and we, too, found it difficult to maintain an air of somnolent indifference to the world.

Presently we were standing outside again, among the flowers of the garden and in the sunny hallway, while we cast a last glance caressingly over the pleasant house, clean as a splinter within and without, and toward the gayly colored balcony from which once more we could hear feminine garments flutter, though hidden from our eyes. The lady who was with me was full to the brim of experiences, and feminine delight shone from her feverishly sparkling eyes and from cheeks ruddy with excitement. They had managed to understand each other with hands

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and eyes and feet, and stammering efforts to converse, and had had a royal good time. Feminine curiosity on both sides had full sway, and while the Turkish women, strangers to the world, searched the handbag of their foreign visitor to its innermost corners, and while they tried on European clothes and experimented with cosmetics, she, the foreign woman, had fumbled with just as much keenness and curiosity through the brightly colored old trunks in which lay the rich clothing of the harem women with its gold and silver embroidery. The richness of the ladies' clothing was unbelievable, so adorned was it with gold and silver; and the old gold coins alone, with which the colored headdresses were adorned, amounted to a fortune. The women had heaps of hand-embroidered kerchiefs mountainhigh, and the European lady had received a souvenir in the form of a curious piece of handwork, a carefully wrought flower.

As she stepped into the women's quarters, so my companion told me, the young women came joyously to meet her and led her over to an old lady who was sitting on a cushion. There were one old woman and four young ones in the room, besides three young girls and four little children, and the women told her that usually several families of close relatives lived together

sometimes there were fifty or sixty persons, and of course it was difficult for all to get along together. To-day the ladies were wearing simple clothing, and instead of shoes they were wearing coarse embroidered overstockings. Were they beautiful? Hardly, according to European standards; but there were some young girls whom one might almost call lovely. They take special pains in the care of their hands. The finger-nails were, of course, stained with henna. All the ladies wore their hair covered with cloths, and explained

that a Moslem woman would rather expose her bosom than her hair. Careless, almost childlike, gayety reigned in the harem, and they discoursed of feminine intimacies with great pleasure on both sides. Yet, whenever they could hear a sound from without, a shadow seemed to fall across the room. In terror lest men should enter, the young girls ran like frightened birds to the door and held it fast. Once the sonin-law came into the room, and all the women kissed his hands with the most servile submissiveness.

These women of the harem grow old very quickly. At twenty they are already faded, while at forty they are old. In an out-of-the-way town like Prizren the visit of a foreigner was a great event, and that was why they had detained the foreign lady for almost two hours.

In a garden under the mild sky of the Orient we talked pro and con about, love and women in the Orient. Love? There is no such thing for the Moslem woman, and there cannot be. The young girl waits, with no great expectation of love, for the man whom she must marry unseen, and she takes up her life in the harem because it is an old custom. This life, they may think fatalistically, is not very agreeable, but it is so, and not otherwise. The man whom they are to marry goes to the mufti, concludes a bargain, and deposits a small sum-enough for a few weeks. If he is willing to lose this amount, he may make up his mind either way. The life of the Moslem woman is very limited, and even a divorced woman can marry again only

if her previous husband permits; but if the husband has died, the older brother of the husband then has the first right.

The marriage customs themselves are quite different from those in the West. The chosen wife is taken to her husband's haremlik on the wedding day. She makes a symbolic bow at the chamber, that she may long remain at the house, and she prays Allah to give her love. Then she daubs her face thickly with white, creamy paste, paints red figures on it, and sticks lead coins on her face. Thus she waits with downcast eyes, half stuck-together with the coins, for the man who comes late in the evening from where he has been feasting with his friends. He lifts her veil, washes the salve from her face in the bath of the house, and now knows for the first time whom it is he has married.

There was much to be said by both parties, and enlightened Moslems told us that all these customs are highly uncivilized. Mohammed did not demand them, and Kemal Pasha had, God be praised, cast them aside. In Stamboul, both veil and harem were now abandoned, and women there are receiving the same treatment as men. They no longer hide their beauty and youth in sackcloth and ashes as they do here in Macedonia; nor need they walk behind the horse of the husband. At length we came to the psychological problem of the jealous Moslem husband. As the freedom of the Moslem woman grows, the harem will soon disappear with its lord - a figure more comic than romantic.

THE recent visit of Dr. Kammerer to this country and the appearance of a popular brochure on heredity have been accepted in certain sections of the press as earnest that biological science is returning to the Lamarckian fold and once more embracing the inheritance of acquired characters. It is perhaps natural that such a misunderstanding should exist. Though we should treat the reflections of a film star on astronomy with the respect they merit, we experience no surprise when a popular playwright indulges his incorrigible amateurishness in a preface on the evolution theory. This is partly because the study of inheritance has only during the last three decades attained to that precision which gives it priority as an exact science over other branches of biological knowledge; and few people as yet can be expected to realize that a reputation for biological investigation in other fields can no longer be accepted as a guaranty of expert opinion. The truth is that genetics, the scientific study of inheritance, has in extending its operations become more and more detached from the general body of biological inquiry, and the men who have preeminently contributed to this extension - Bateson, Morgan, Punnett, Goldschmidt, and others have been too busy replacing the folklore of the Lamarckian and Darwinian periods with mathematical expressions of direct experiment on hereditary transmission to attempt any all-embracing

1 From the Manchester Guardian (IndependentLiberal daily), January 2

presentation of the way in which living creatures have evolved.

The exact study of heredity begins with the experiments of a brilliant contemporary of Darwin, the Abbé Mendel, whose work lay for many years unrecognized, till his principles were independently rediscovered by three Continental workers in the opening years of the twentieth century. Since then it has become the basis of all subsequent investigation on profitable lines. The essence of Mendel's method is simple to grasp. Instead of comparing the offspring and parents as a whole, he concentrated attention on individual characteristics as the unit, and in making his crosses employed individuals which had bred pure for generations for the characteristic whose transmission was being studied. In this way he found that, when parents showing a particular character were mated with parents which did not show it, the distribution of the character among succeeding generations of the cross regularly followed a definite rule. In the simplest case it works out in this way. When the first crossbred generation are all alike and when individuals of this generation are mated inter se, those of the next generation fall into three categories in predictable numerical proportions: one half are impure, and breed like their parents of the first generation; the other half are pure, and fall into equal groups, one resembling the father, the other the mother, of the original cross. Mendel was thus led to conceive of the characters of an

individual as the expression of material factors of which one is contributed by the mother and one by the father. If when the egg or sperms are formed these material entities (genes they are called nowadays) are separately distributed, the proportions and types which arise in crosses between individuals of different characters follow from the laws of probability and may be predicted with as much confidence as, say, the action of chloroform on the human heart.

When Mendel's researches were rescued from their obscurity times were more propitious to an appreciation of their significance. For microscopists probing into the secrets of the 'cells' or microscopic bricks of which our tissues are made had revealed in them the presence of material bodies, the chromosomes, which do in fact behave in a manner precisely corresponding to that of Mendel's hypothetical factors. Had Mendel been less fortunate in selecting character differences which depend on single genes his discovery would have been delayed; but the stimulus of his lead urged others to continue. Through the labors of Correns, Bateson, and others the applicability of Mendel's law to the unraveling of an immense diversity of hereditary qualities in animals and plants increasingly encouraged the belief that the most seemingly obscure phenomena would, if patiently analyzed by the experimental method which Mendel. introduced, fall into line with the Mendelian law. And to-day we can confidently state that there is no type of hereditary characteristic color, weight, size, number of parts, and so forth - for which Mendelian inheritance has not been proved to hold good when sufficient trouble has been taken to ascertain all the facts. Some most spectacular advances have centred in the analysis of sex, which has

been discussed in past issues of the Manchester Guardian.

Till twelve years ago genetical investigation had been hampered greatly by the difficulty of getting satisfactory animals or plants for experiment. To be satisfactory for the purpose of the geneticist a species must breed prolifically and rapidly in the laboratory, and there must be a sufficient variety of true-breeding character-differences among its members. In 1912 Morgan, of Columbia University, observed that the fruit fly Drosophila produces frequent sports or mutants. It breeds prolifically, its life cycle is complete in ten days, and it will live happily in a glass bottle with a supply of fermenting bananas. Furthermore it possesses a very small number of chromosomes (four pairs). The rapidity with which it breeds makes it possible to rear more generations of Drosophila in twelve months than of human beings in five centuries. It had been shown prior to Morgan's work that some characters are transmitted together that is to say, they depend on factors which reside in the same material unit. Morgan's great discovery, based on the study of about five hundred characters, in all cases transmitted according to Mendel's law, was that all the characters of Drosophila fall into a number of groups the members of which tend to be transmitted together, exactly corresponding to the number of pairs (four) of maternal and paternal chromosomes in the cells of the body; and later he was able to arrive at a mathematical expression for the actual arrangement of the hereditary factors in the microscopic chromosomes. These expressions can be and have been successfully put to experimental test.

The outcome of this work has been important in its bearings on the problems of stock-breeding and agriculture; and America has not been slow to show

its appreciation by endowments which place the American geneticist in a position of considerable advantage over his European colleagues. As yet the geneticist is content to press on with his analysis to a further knowledge of how new true-breeding types appear as sports or mutants, rather than formulate ambitious hypotheses of the evolutionary process. Two things can, however, be said with confidence.

First, that the exact study of heredity has not given any encourage ment for regression to the view that environmental influences operating on the parent can induce corresponding changes in the offspring. There is no more justification for this view to-day than when Weismann forty years ago challenged its advocates to produce any. On the contrary, the constancy which a new true-breeding or mutant character displays in experimental conditions makes the Lamarckian view less acceptable than it ever was.

The second conclusion which may be drawn from recent research is that Darwin's view of natural selection appears as an argumentum ad hominem elaborated to meet objections that were invalid and founded on premises that are unsound. In Darwin's time ideas of hereditary transmission were vague. It was not till fifteen years after the publication of the Origin of Species that the origin of a new individual from a single sperm and a single egg-cell was conclusively proved.

To Darwin's contemporaries it seemed evident that, if the results of crossing were generally intermediate between the parents, new types must always be swamped out of existence in the long run. Darwin's critics argued

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that if a black parent mated with white produces gray offspring, gray mated with black must produce darker gray, and so on, so that if a white individual turned up in the normal course of events its distinguishing quality would be diluted out of existence in a few generations. Darwin replied that this was not so if white had an advantage over black in the struggle for existence. Darwin's natural selection was invented to counteract the 'swamping' argument. But the conception of swamping is a false one. Mendelian experiment shows that if two types are crossed it is always theoretically possible to recover both parental types in their original purity in the second generation. We no longer need a theory of natural selection to account for the persistence of new types. Natural selection is simply concerned with eliminating those that are not good enough to live.

Thus the position of the evolutionary hypothesis has been strengthened by modern research. The evolutionary hypothesis still remains the most plausible account of how living creatures have come into being in the history of the earth. But the problem of sterility, why some forms can interbreed and others cannot, is as yet but little understood, though there have been hopeful advances of late in this field. The experimental foundations of evolutionary theory will not be firmly established till we can produce in the laboratory mutants which refuse to interbreed. This may now be a fait accompli in a few years. For the present the geneticist is content to confine his inquiries to a closer understanding of the hereditary mechanism,