THE AMERICAN SOCIOLOGIST 99 



books. In his own words, he has "recently taken to a book 

 writing epoch." I have not read all his productions, but in 

 the comparatively large amount of his writings that have 

 come before me, I have been struck by two salient ideas 

 which seem to me to be ideas of prime order. The first is 

 the peculiar importance he attaches to fire, not only in its 

 function as an instrument, or means, of economic progress, 

 but also to its purely emotional value and significance in 

 domestic and religious life. We have here a notion that 

 carries us far back in the phylogeny of the human race and 

 that binds together things very remote from one another in 

 point of historical time and of the geographical distribution 

 of men upon the earth. Patten has paid some attention to 

 the nervous system and is familiar, in a superficial w^ay, with 

 the nervous mechanism and some of its more obvious workings. 

 His principal work (although a small one) is The Theory of 

 Social Forces, in which he suggests the second of his two 

 prime ideas mentioned above. This is the quite simple and 

 highly significant fact that social environment continuously 

 changes (in a static condition) without an accompanying 

 change of place whereupon the society lives. Patten does 

 not develop this idea, although it is difficult to understand 

 how a man who could be struck with the fact would not be 

 led to pursue it. Patten, in fact, has bridged over the gap 

 between the societies which have a history and those which 

 have not. He apparently did not see the social importance 

 of fire as an instrument which would of necessity compel men 

 to wander from warm into colder climates and thus make 

 possible the development of the tall, blonde, dolichocephalic 

 races of northern Europe; nor has he seen fit to connect the 

 idea of fire with his earlier investigations into the spatial 

 relations of the environment to man. But even if we over- 

 look this neglect, we cannot but admire the depth of his 

 thought and the singularity of his observations as a sociolo- 

 gist. If there be a man in America who deserves the title 

 American Scholar, and deserves it without qualification, 

 Dr. Patten is unquestionably fit for that honor. 



The mention of Dr. Patten's name suggests that of his 

 neighbor, Professor Giddings of Columbia university. Gid- 



