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422 PHILOSOPHICAL PERIODICALS. tendency towards fixity." (8) The emotional intensity of gambling is further due to the presence of many of the strongest egoistic instinctive feelings. The key to the psychology of excess, to the tendency to seek intensive emotional situations, may be "the attempt, through natural selection, to put oneself on a higher metabolic level". (4) Man easily lapses from intellectual effort and sustained active attention. Gambling is seductive as offering the rewards of work without our working. (5) Regarded as play, gambling is of great sociological and ethical import- ance. " In play, for a long time at least, the race would revive its psychic past, having created the stimuli prevalent in its primitive environment." The ' psychic centres ' may seem to become rudimentary, and yet go on in active function, as play centres. " Play would thus be an index to the history of the psychic life." (6) Gambling, as all similar instinct-activi- ties, cannot be stamped out, but should be channelised into harmless courses.] R. R. G-urley. ' The Habits of Fishes.' [Deals principally with the native American Salmonids. (1) The significant fact in the temperature-relations of fishes is the distribution of spawning with re- ference to the signs of the temperature-zodiac ; (2) the immediate stimulus to spawning is the definite temperature trend in one direction ; (8) structurally similar forms tend strongly to sustain in their spawning similar relations to the temperature-curve (certain apparent exceptions can be harmonised with this law) ; (4) for a given species the tempera- ture-relations which determine its migration and probably also its geographical distribution are the same as those that determine its spawning ; (5) these facts demonstrate the presence of a nervous mechanism that is responsive to temperature ; (6) this mechanism is a character of prime importance, and is entitled to at least super-family rank ; (7) its existence explains why with spawning in cooling water is r and must be, associated migration to cooler water with boreal distri- bution ; and with spawning in warming water, migration to warmer water with austral distribution ; (8) by a working backwards from the time of most successful hatching, the time of spawning has been de- termined by way of natural selection ; (9) the spawning time being thus fixed, natural selection, by a further working backward, has de- termined the time of precedent migration.] E. C. Sanford. ' Mental Growth and Decay.' [" A psychologist's sketch of mental development, from the first beginnings of mind at or before birth to the final failure and break-down of the powers in old age." Brief descriptions of the seven ages of man : babyhood, childhood, youth, young manhood, middle age, the period of the elderly, senescence : in the light of two general laws of growth Minot's law, that " the time required to accomplish a change of a given extent increases with the age of the organism " (with Fiske's corollary of long infancy and high ultimate development), and Wundt's law that " the later stage arises solely from the preceding stage, and yet appears to be a new creation in comparison with it ".] Litera- ture. Notes. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ETHICS. Vol. xiii., No. 2. L. C. Steward- son. * The Moral Aspects of the Referendum.' [A study of the moral and political effects of the institution as exhibited in Switzerland and the United States.] J. E. Me Tag g art. ' Some Considerations Relating to Human Immortality.' [My self cannot be regarded as an activity of my body, since matter has no existence apart from mind. My present body is not an essential condition of the existence of my self. The fact that material objects are transitory raises no presumption that the self is also transitory, since its character is disparate.] M. E. Robinson. ' Marriage as an Economic Institution.' [An argument in favour of an