Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/351

Rh part takes up the works selected under various partial and especially suggestive aspects: religion, humor, self-esteem, genius, sex relations, and so forth. Here the author reaches certain conclusions of interest, as that the relation of the sexes to each other has changed less with the centuries than attitudes toward nature or toward society at large; that the prevailing happiness of the intellectual life negates the pathological theories of genius; that the study of religious confession has hitherto been illusory and misleading. The work here is admittedly selective and incomplete; but, again, the reader is pleasantly directed to the original sources. The volume closes with a series of bibliographical appendices.

As a supplement to the centenary edition of Emerson's works, the publishers have decided to issue an edition of his journals. The first intention was to begin the publication with the year 1833, after Emerson's return from his first visit to Europe; "but, on carefully reading the journals for the fourteen years preceding that time, for the boy faithfully kept them from the age of seventeen onwards, it seemed well to the editors to introduce large extracts from these." "The extracts from the early journals are not chosen for their merit alone: they show the soil out of which Emerson grew, the atmosphere around, his habits and mental food, his doubts, his steady, earnest purpose, and the things he outgrew. His frankness with himself is seen, and how he granted the floor to the adversary for a fair hearing." These first volumes cover Emerson's life at college (beginning Feb., 1820; ending June, 1821); his experiences as school teacher and divinity student (1822-1826); the period elapsing between ordination ('approbation to preach') and engagement (end of 1826 to end of 1828); and the ministry of the Second Church of Boston (1829-1832). The Editors have performed their task admirably; and the books themselves, illustrated by photogravure and other plates, and well printed upon a light cream colored paper, do credit to the publishers.

The author of this little book received his experimental training in Kulpe's laboratory at Wiirzburg, and is favorably known by his doctorate thesis ('Experimental Contributions to a Theory of Thought') and by later publications in Meumann's Archiv. He has here attempted to make accessible to students and teachers the most vocable of the experimental results obtained during the past quarter century in the study of memory and related subjects. After a general ^ritroduction, he discusses the experimental investigation of memory, some general questions (child and adult, memory and intelligence, etc.), the factors which influence memory, mental imagery, thoughts, and rules for the economy and training of memory. The work is simply Written, and the conclusions and recommendations are in general sound. If criticism has anything to remark, it is that the author betrays an occasional tendency to generalize and deduce beyond the limits of his experimental data. In this respect, his book is inferior to that of Offner (Das Gedächtnis: see this Journal, xx, 1909, 457).