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 THE PRESENT STATUS OF SOCIOLOGY IN GERMANY 799

might also assign as the cause constant intermarriage within restricted groups.

Ammon might have learned from Galton that the intellectual aristocracy does not perpetuate itself through many generations That the social aristocracy remains so long in control is perhaps due rather to the slowness of social development than to a " for- tunate" natural law. At all events it is impossible to join in the naive optimism of Ammon: "We have found reason for the assumption that in most cases the right man comes to the fitting place, and to the right place comes the fitting man " (p. 179). The world is as yet far from such harmony and will doubtless long remain so.

In one respect I fully agree with Ammon, namely, in the demand that chairs of ethnology, anthropology, and sociology should be founded in the German universities (HocJischuUn). These disciplines are in point of fact sadly neglected. There are no special chairs of sociology, and in only a few uni- versities are there even docents who treat this discipline more or less exclusively. So far as I know there are, in Berlin, Georg Simmel, in Freiburg, E. Grosse, and in Leipsic, Paul Earth.

Simmel has an audience that is increasing in numbers each semester. For several years he has read in the summer semes- ter on social psychology, and in the winter semester a special course on sociology. Everyone who knows his Einleitung in die Moralwissenscltaften will guess that in his lectures on ethics he introduces and suggests many sociological ideas and points of view. Besides this he conducts a seminar for sociological practice. Here reports are made on sociological books and independent dissertations are read. Simmel himself usually conducts the discussions. This is for the moment very agreea- ble to the listeners, but it is pedagogically by no means advan- tageous. A seminar is solely for the purpose of accustoming the members to independent work through their own elabora- tions of subjects, and especially through active participation in