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 NOTES AND ABSTRACTS 281

ditions as well as of individual characters. This involves knowledge of genealogy, type, and human pairing. As to types there are healthy and un- healthy susceptibilities to disease, the latter, the exception. The popular side of Eugenics is as important as the scientific, because without popular assistance, we cannot get data. The method suggested is the working through the medical advisers of each family, secrecy being guaranteed, getting rid of the popular delusion that heredity is fatalistic, by teaching solid truths about child and adult individualities. — J. Lionel Taylor, Westminster Review, October, 1908. F. F.

France and Her Vanishing Population. — The problem overshadowing all others in France is her gradually diminishing birth-rate. Twenty years ago, the average number of births per marriage was three, and now it is scarcely two ; and this coincident with the soil's increased productivity through scientific tillage and use of machinery. Thrift, the essence and foundation of French character, is responsible for the controlled birth-rate, aided by the law of equal testamentary division of property among children and the dowry system. — Frederick Courtland Penfield, North American Review, November, 1908. F. F.

Militant Tactics and Woman's Suffrage. — It is unfair to upbraid women for their militant tactics, in the suffragette movement. When women possess full human and civic rights, they may justly be called upon in common with other possessors of such rights, to confine themselves to constitutional measures, but since quiet appeals of forty or fifty years failed to obtain a hearing, it can hardly be said that constitutional measures of any sort of efficacy are really open to them. Not having the vote, they cannot get the vote. A state which refuses ordinary constitutional means of expression and self-defense to half its members, must not be surprised if they resort to unauthorized ones. — Westminster Review, December, 1908. F. F.

The Spiritual Unrest. — "Forty Protestant churches in various parts of the country — not to speak of hundreds of Christian Science churches — are now con- ducting 'religious clinics' or health services for the healing of the sick. Begin- ning with the work of the Rev.^Dr Elwood Worcester and his associate. Rev. Dr. Samuel McComb, at Emmanuel Church in Boston in 1906, the movement has spread with a rapidity which indicates that it must have met a genuine human need." This movement is a belated effort of the church to get into line with modern psychological results and to apply the great power latent in suggestion to the alleviation of diseased and overstrained conditions of mind and body. Actual cases of treatment by suggestion are described. The work of eminent psychologists and physicians in the movement is touched upon, and criticisms, as well as the limitations of the work, are dealt with. — Ray Stannard Baker, American Magazine, December, 1908. H. M.

Eigentumsempfindung und Diebstahisrecht, insbesondere bei den natur- volkern. — Travelers often complain of the thievishness of savage races. They have generally drawn their conclusions on the basis of the treatment they have themselves been subjected to. These conclusions cannot be taken as an indica- tion of the moral standard existing within the tribe. In the majority of cases which have been observed, property rights are carefully upheld by uncivilized peoples, within their own social groups, and often in their dealings with strangers as well. Errors of judgment often arise through the application of our moral ideals, and our property-concepts to primitive peoples. Ideas of property, like other moral relations, depend upon the conditions under which the group has developed, and upon the stage which that development has attained. — Dr. Edward Westermarck, Zeitschrift fiir Socialwissenschaft. H. M.

Soziologie und Geschichtswissenschaft. — Some have in recent times denied that history is a science because it does not attempt to discover laws, but only to state events. History may be defined as the science of succession or continuity. It has to do with the sequence and coexistence of occurrences. According to my conception, sociology is the science of the coherence of phe- nomena, the science of the typical successions of phenomena. It is the extract