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504 are equal. Each is a freeman, a king. They ask no one to support or rule them. Each family is a world in itself of which the husband is head. The heads of families form the parish."

This parish elects its own officers and receives or expels members. It is not quite clear what would be done with a recalcitrant skeptic or agnostic. The dose of creed and ritual is by no means scant. "The rites of the parish are baptism, confirmation, the Lord's Supper, pardon, matrimony, healing and ordination. In these mysteries of religion is the recognition that God is a Cosmic Power, and rules this earth through solar force. There is also the Christian confession that this aqueous age of the planet is passing away and the age of the Spirit is coming."

The need of a larger political body is recognized, "the coöperative commonwealth, called a diocese or state, whose chief officer could be called bishop or governor."

The book is typical. It is a curious psychical study. It proves that the kaleidoscopic possibilities of the constructive imagination, in the employment of a very few simple pieces of highly colored fragments, are practically boundless. It shows at work, in the stage of ferment, a deeply ethical and sympathetic nature. Its scientific value is nothing. There is not a trace of the scientific temper or method. There are assumptions stated in a single line which it would require a volume to prove.

Primitive Civilizations. By Macmillan & Co., pp. x+576+554. $10.00. has evidently lavished labor and patience upon these two large, compact, and admirable volumes, and the result is a book which for interest to the student of social institutions may be compared with Spencer's Principles of Sociology, and Westermarck's History of Human Marriage. But it resembles these works perhaps less than it differs from them. Westermarck is a master in polemics on a question of origins where it is too much to ask that any single thesis be accepted as covering every case, and confines himself to a single aspect of the life-process; Spencer is boundlessly suggestive but frequently tangential and sometimes preposterous, limiting himself neither geographically nor chronologically in his search for materials to illustrate his views of the interworking of social forces in the aggregate. Miss Simcox's plan is a compromise between these two. She has considered the Egyptian,