4 6o POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



best illustration of the combination of all three interests as applied to 

 a single topic. 



The selection of this third group of topics for more especial notice 

 is the natural one, as therein are contained the points of view that have 

 directed the entire work as it became formulated in the author's mind, 

 and upon the value of which its ultimate standing will depend. What 

 is known as the 'recapitulation theory' becomes in Dr. Hall's treatment 

 a direct aid to interpretation as well as a guide to interest and applica- 

 tion. Its central message is fairly familiar, and emphasizes the fact 

 that there is contained in our physical and functional heredity the 

 vestiges of the several slow and tortuous changes that have intervened 

 between the earliest forms of life and their successive unfoldment into 

 that diversified series of organisms culminating in homo sapi&ns. The 

 doctrine thus means that the oldest of human structural traits and 

 functional tendencies must find their analogy, as well as their type of 

 explanation, in a study of animal and of primitive human character- 

 istics. 



Like many a biological trait, and most typically like the great fact 

 of sex itself, this principle has a wide range of secondary implications. 

 Among these the accounting for present human traits, by means of 

 those strongest in primitive life, of the type that we find among un- 

 cultured peoples, is of all the most comprehensive. It gives to that 

 longer and more fundamental life of human endeavor a living par- 

 ticipation in the make-up of present psychic traits, and prevents an 

 overestimation of the importance of those newer and less inwardly 

 absorbed tendencies which we too exclusively regard as coming within 

 the ken of psychology, and too exclusively train in systems of educa- 

 tion. More concretely, this principle emphasizes the importance, for 

 the comprehension and the training of minds, of the life of the feelings 

 and of the will. Men have felt and men have acted for ages before 

 they guided their actions by thought; and the reverberation of these 

 long emotionally ruled periods must have left decided traces upon those 

 tendencies which will best be expressed in the early and adolescent stages 

 of the individual. The history of philosophic opinion itself in inter- 

 preted by Dr. Hall in terms of a similar development, in which imma- 

 ture adolescent systems, staid senescent and blase philosophies have ap- 

 peared and appealed to their public in direct relation to the status of 

 the culture-periods in which they found origin and favor. Our own 

 day is decidedly that of the exaggeration of the rational processes, of 

 complete subordination of feelings and will to thought. This type of 

 cerebration is as evident in the studies that we teach, in the education 

 that we favor, as in the philosophies that we read. With the last, in- 

 deed, Dr. Hall has a special issue; regarding, as he does, that this 

 indulgence in speculation of the theory-of-knowledge type, has tended 

 to inject unduly into psychological considerations the spirit and the 



