Biology

Abstract

THE late Prof. W. H. Wheeler began his career as a naturalist and later subjected his interests in living organisms to the disciplinary influence of scientific training. His philosophical outlook was conditioned not only by the naturalist's disciplined imagination arising out of a vast, first-hand acquaintance with animals and their behaviour, for he was, in addition, a great man of letters and a distinguished prose writer. His bibliography contains some 467 titles, most of them concerned with the classification, structure and behaviour of ants, but a considerable number deal with problems of embryology, evolution, parasitism and the social life of insects in general. These formal books have had great influence upon the world of biological thought, but his observations of insects in the field caused him to make incursions into psychology and sociology, and he became a master of the comparative branches of these sciences.

Essays in Philosophical Biology

By William Morton Wheeler. Selected by Prof. G. H. Parker. Pp. xv + 261. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1939.) 12s. 6d. net.