Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/138

128 certainly recognized since Le Sueur's time. The only profitable fishery of the common sturgeon—unless the Florida sturgeon should prove to be of the same form—is on the eastern coast of the Delaware River and Bay. A considerable amount of capital is invested in the business. The experience of the dealers and fishermen shows that a steady falling off has occurred in the catch within a few years. This and other facts prove that it is high time that something was being done to stay the extinction of the fish. The only means of maintaining and increasing the industry is through artificial propagation; and the author has every reason to think that this may be successfully accomplished at a comparatively insignificant outlay.

idea of personality is easily handled by metaphysicians who assume an ego. The school of experimental psychology, however, which claims M. Ribot, views this as no simple task, but rather the reward of arduous research. In the present volume, therefore, the author seeks through investigation of those cases in which the sense of personality is disorganized to discover a clew to its nature. In order to know human personality we must analyze it, but it must be remembered that the phenomena separated for purposes of analysis are interdependent. The various disorders of personality may be classified as organic, emotional, and intellectual. The sense of individuality in the normal body, its fluctuations dependent upon alterations in general or local sensibility, the egoistic sense in monsters and twins, show "as the organism, so the personality." Emotional manifestations peculiar to impaired nutrition, sexual aberration, and perversion of the higher instincts are found to confirm the same proposition. Intellectual vagaries of all kinds, due to sensorial derangement, hallucinations, the phenomena of hypnotism and of mysticism, furnish the corollary that ideas are only a secondary factor in changes of personality.

Regarding personality as "the highest form of psychic individuality," the nature of consciousness and the individual is involved.

Instead of the subjective notion that consciousness is "a basic property of soul," M. Ribot finds it "a simple phenomenon super-added to activity of the brain, appearing and disappearing according to circumstances." States of consciousness are coincident with disassimilation of nervous tissue, so that we may predict that they depend upon a certain state of the nervous system. But we do not yet understand all of the physiological conditions of consciousness.

If individual be defined as that which is not divided, we are obliged to descend very low in the organic world to find an example. "Every protoplasmic mass which attains a few tenths of a millimetre spontaneously divides itself. Protoplasm in the individual state is therefore limited in size." Scientists may find a rudimentary consciousness in the unfolding, absorbing, and dividing of the lowest organism; but M. Ribot considers this an irritability common to living beings, which is developed into the general sensibility of more complex forms. In colonies of Hydractinia, or in Agalmidæ, where locomotion is centralized, we meet with a co-ordination which is the germ of personality. Gradually, as the nervous system becomes more prominent, psychic individuality is constituted. In any given time the sum of nervous actions in man will far exceed the sum of the states of consciousness. Thus conscious personality is but an abstract of what takes place in the nervous centers. "Why certain nervous actions become conscious, and which are they?" is yet unanswerable. Different states of consciousness succeed each other and depend upon nervous activity. Pathology confirms the fact that the feeling of the ego changes with the bodily condition. The problem thus becomes biological, and psychology must wait, therefore, for a fuller knowledge of the genesis of organisms.

of this book shows extensive reading on the part of the author, and a clear conception of the principles of evolution. Some of the chapters are very interesting. It is difficult, however, to see the purposes of the book: as a help to the