Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/651

Rh can alone fill out the details. Any attempt to do this in advance is certain to become antiquated in a short time and reflect no credit on its author. To say that it must be the result of an increased "knowledge of the environment," and depends on the "visualization" of "indirect methods" is only to repeat what has been said before, and is too general to be of any service in the solution of so complex a problem.

It would be inappropriate to a review to point out the golden opportunities which our author has lost to broaden and deepen the lessons of his suggestive theme. I hope on a future occasion to show in what interesting ways the subject may be expanded and connected with others that do not seem at first glance to be related to it. I only regret that such an expansion and correlation of the leading ideas of this essay was not made to take the place of much of the obscure but characteristic discussion which is interspersed among the salient doctrines with which they form such a marked contrast. This apparent ambition to render a treatise unintelligible to laymen is greatly to be deplored, especially in writers who really have a message. Such unevenness may be characteristic of genius but it is a form of genius that is strongly suggestive of paranoia. Dr. Patton may be mad, but he certainly has "lucid intervals." He had one such when he wrote his "Rational Principles of Taxation," and now, in writing his "Pain Economy and Pleasure Economy" (for this should have been the title of his essay) he must have had another or something more—a sort of inspiration.

Ethnology. By Cambridge Geographical Series, pp. xxx. + 442. "2.60. Macmillan & Co., 1896.

Ethnology, as it is understood by some students, has to do with peoples, groups of mankind separated from other groups, linguistically, physically or geographically, but has nothing to do with "race." Race is thought to be purely a zoological question. Others understand ethnology to be the study of races of men, varieties in the zoological sense, and their subdivisions into smaller groups, peoples.

Mr. Keane adopts the latter view. Hence he very properly discusses the "races of man." But he has introduced other matter which even in his own opinion does not properly belong in a work on