Reviews of Recent Books

The structure of this book is an interesting variant on familiar text-books of psychology. After a brief introductory chapter on the subject-matter and methods of the science, the student is plunged at once into the technical field of animal psychology. The author admits in his preface that this chapter is " the least well rounded and comprehensive "; and this is true. It is so because many of the integral topics, as, e.g., instinct and habit, are postponed to later sections, where their more general treatment is possible. This is an inevitable outcome of the chosen structure of the (book, and is clearly one of the disadvantages of reversing the more usual order of treatment, and failing to introduce the student to the general concepts of the science before dealing with specialised questions. The same difficulty and dissatisfaction arises throughout the first part of the book, which discusses individual and applied psychology, abnormal, social and racial psychology in turn. Yet we agree that there is much to be said for taking the student