A Treatise on Roads, Their History, Character, and Utility Book

"Origins," chapter six of this book, is interesting. It is also clearly the only reason that the book exists, and I'm giving two stars simply because of that one chapter. The rest of the book is very poor support for that chapter. The arguments are poorly formed.

Moreover, I don't know, this bugged me: there are whole pages which are just quotes from various people. Some of these people are introduced, some are not, one was introduced simply as "a tree lover." But the point is, these quotes are bundled together, and there is little to no original writing by the authors of this book explaining why these quotes are significant to the book's argument. Here is the entire original content of one of these pages:

"Jacob states:...He contends that purpose is part of the essence of the organism:...Dobzhansky writes:...Thorpe points out that purpose opens a line of inquiry unique to the life sciences:...Simpson continues the same idea, arguing that purpose cannot be reduced to physical or chemical considerations:"

This is an entire page of writing! the quotations outstrip the author's writing 8 to 1! This makes the book read more like the rough outline of a student's essay than a finished book.

All this to say that I am keeping my copy of this book only so that I can use it for compost, and in that way it will be able to make a valuable contribution to biology.