Dauntless Adventurer. The Story of Dr. Winston Pettus

These are but a few of the major problems the author had to tackle in writing this book, and he does justice to both sides of the arguments with unrelenting impartiality. The volume obviously is a survey-book for the non-professional public, nevertheless one would still prefer to have some of the author's own opinions instead of sweeping and often contradictory generalizations in an almost epigrammatic style bestudded with poetic metaphors in the best romantic tradition. The problems and methods of survival are organized partly chronologically , and partly by the major aims of life, such as love and social organization. This leads to a good continuity in the development of the subject, in spite of the fact that several chapters had previously been published as separate essays. A highly anthropomorphistic interpretation of Nature and her "actions" may also go some distance to serve this purpose of unity, but it does seem farfetched to visualize Nature as a Communist dictator supervising equal division of protoplasm amongst individuals of a species, or to explain the survival of simple, non-specialized forms of life as an attempt "to achieve racial longevity." The last several chapters are devoted to man and his place in the living world. The author creates perhaps his most striking and satisfying synthesis here, because after some didactic experimentation he does succeed in placing man in a class now distinct from all others, but well connected to them biologically, in spite of the unavoidable Deus ex machina, "the brilliant promise of a brain." The book should not only make good popular reading, but may well serve as collateral reading to an introductory biology course, giving some of the necessary orientation, with adequate factual examples, to the development of the living world. This is the stirring record of a most attractive and able man who had been born in China of missionary parents and who had come to Yale, first as an undergraduate in 1929 and then to the School of Medicine in 1933. He made a name for himself as an outstanding student in the college and as one of the most promising men of his year in the Medical School. He attracted the attention of both the Departments of Anatomy and Physiology during his freshman year 1933-34; in his senior year both Dean Winternitz and Dr. Cushing became interested in him and he had discussions with both about his future …