Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/841

 REVIEWS 825

thinker." Much time and annoyance would have been saved the reader if the digests of literature which are interwoven into the text had been printed in different type or in some way differentiated from the body of the discussion. It is extremely wearisome to have to wade through a great mass of commentaried bibliography in order to get the author's own views. There is much in the book besides discussion of the subject of adolescence. This subject is rather a center about which is clustered a great variety of topics sometimes only remotely connected with the subject. But if, as the author himself says, the study of the gastrocnemius muscle of a frog's leg in his youth opened up all the problems of the universe, this surely may be true also of a subject of the importance of adolescence. But the reasons for introducing much, in itself of interest, but only indirectly connected with adolescence, are apt to be far from clear to the average reader, for whom, as the author says, the book is intended as much as for the educational expert. It is unfortunate that the tone of the book will appear to many as distinctly morbid. But this may very possibly be the fault of the prudishness of the reader rather than any misleading bias on the part of the author. And whether morbid or not, the book as a whole is certainly dis- tinctly optimistic.

The reviewer has followed the suggestion in the preface and begun his study of the book with chap. 10, because this chapter, the author says, contains a rough indication of the psychological prin- ciples upon which the entire work is based. The psychology, which should logically have been published first, is promised for the near future.

The newness and startling character of the matter and method of Dr. Hall's work are not as great as he thinks. Nor is the " dis- honorable captivity to epistemology " of current psychology, of which he complains, as prevalent as he supposes. And it may be doubted whether anyone, if the author had not himself suggested it, would have thought of comparing his work in psychology with that of Darwin in biology. The work of the two men is alike in respect of the vast accumulation of data, but there the resemblance ceases. Certainly there is no great psychological generalization hit off in this work comparable to that which made Darwin's writings famous. To be sure, we should not have missed it if the author himself had not so explicitly called our attention to the matter on the first page of his preface.