Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/840

 REVIEWS

Adolescence: Its Psychology and its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Educa- tion. By G. STANLEY HALL, PH.D., LL.D., President of Clark University and Professor of Psychology and Peda- gogy. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1904. Vol. I, pp. xx + 589; Vol. II, pp. 784.

It is easy to criticise, hard to evaluate, a book of this kind. At times it seems to the reviewer, as he faithfully plods through its fourteen hundred pages, that the author could not have hit upon a more effective way of shelving the whole subject of adolescence than by writing these two volumes. The book was not intended to be read at one sitting. Indeed, there is evidence that the author did not expect any single person ever to read it through. With great enthu- siasm for the subject and control of one's temper, it may be accom- plished, and with profit. But it is a compendium rather than a treatise, insufferable from a literary point of view, and will be dis- appointing to many on that account The book is too large from nearly every point of view, and probably few in this busy age will have the patience to cull out the really valuable part of it from the interesting and instructive, but nevertheless bewildering, mass of material which all but engulfs it. There is much literal, and still more virtual, repetition throughout the book, partly unavoidable in a compilation of this sort, but some of it inexcusable in a work which professes to be the achievement of a lifetime.

It was certainly a great and noble ambition here laboriously achieved that of bringing together all the best that has been said and written on this important subject from the diverse fields of biology, psychology, anthropology, archaeology, custom, myth, folk- lore, and literature. In view of the worthy aim, the patient search of every human document for the facts, and the sympathetic interpreta- tion of their significance for education, we may pass over a certain ostentation of erudition and a license in the use of words which is sometimes astonishing. Doubtless this is only a phase of the novejty which the author claims for his mode of treatment, as an "organic

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