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 614 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

intensity and immediateness which can best be characterized as " reli- gious" in quality.

In Book I, "The Mind of Crowds," it is the processes of crowd action which Le Bon mainly treats. In Book II, "The Opinions and Beliefs of Crowds," the emphasis is on the content of their souls that is, the scope and concrete conditions of their activities. Book III discusses several forms of heterogeneous crowds. Probably these chapters on the criminal crowd, the jury, the electoral crowd, and the parliamentary crowd are the ones which will excite the greatest prac- tical interest. Assuredly anyone who has been watching from a non- partisan standpoint those processes called discussion and argument in the present political campaign will find much here to interest him.

The homogeneous crowds, sect, caste, and class are not discussed in this volume, but a treatment of them is promised in a later work.

The translation is as a whole very satisfactory, though occasionally an amusing error creeps in ; rarely, however, to the serious detriment of the sense. Despite the general good appearance of the volume, the student cannot but regret the tripling in both bulk and price which it has undergone in the process of reproduction.

ARTHUR F. BENTLEY.

Alterations of Personality. By ALFRED BINET, translated by Helen Green Baldwin, with notes and preface by J. Mark Baldwin. New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1896. Pp. x+3Q6. IT is a most gratifying and unusual experience to meet with a book treating in a thoroughly sane manner the facts of abnormal and morbid mental life such as are found in hypnotism, somnambulism and the various types of hysteria. Indeed it has long been recog- nized by conservative psychologists that hypnotism and the cognate fields of investigation were intellectually and professionally "extra hazardous," so seldom has a psychologist dabbled in them and come off unscathed by fantastic and uncouth theories.

Professor Binet has in the main succeeded in fulfilling his avowed purpose to suppress all merely theoretic and discursive matter and to present simply a coherent statement of such phenomena as are agreed upon by all observers of the disturbances of personality. Of course he has his own theory of the nature of personality and he marshals his facts in support of the same. But the facts are really allowed to