NATURE 



[July 17, 19 19 



to renounce. He alone who has striven and won 

 can enrich the world by giving away the fruits 

 of his victorious experience. . . . The ideal of 

 giving, of enriching — in fine, of self-renunciation 

 in response to the highest call of humanity, is the 

 other and complementary ideal." 



The scientific papers are divided into two 

 groups : part i., "Response in Plant Organs," and 

 part ii., " Growth and its Responsive Variations." 

 In many of the papers Sir J. C. Bose was assisted 

 by his research students. 



Ever since the days of his clumsy efforts to 

 induce preparations of frogs' nerves and muscles 

 to perform their movements with military preci- 

 sion, the present writer must confess to a dislike 

 to all dealings with smoked glass plates and trac- 

 ings thereupon. The records upon which the con- 

 clusions of the Calcutta laboratory are based are, 

 however, on an entirely different level. In these, 

 skill in manipulation and the, most ingenious clock- 

 work and electrical devices have been combined lo 

 evolve methods whereby the minute movements of 

 response to carefully regulated stimuli have been 

 recorded on the same chart as their time relation.^. 



In order to cut out errors arising from the 

 variation of factors other than the one under 

 consideration, the observations are in most cases 

 made only for a very short period of "time. This 

 is possible with the aid of the great magnification 

 employed ; the latter is obtained by a combination 

 of levers coupled with the disturbance of equili- 

 brium in a magnetic field due to the motion of the 

 steel lever in it. 



The massed attack of the workers in the Bose 

 Institute has in a very short time cleared up much 

 that was obscure in the phenomena of response. 

 It may be noted, however, that the papers contain 

 very few references to current literature, but this 

 is perhaps owing to the novelty of the methods 

 used. In particular, the recent work upon the 

 transmission of a stimulus through a glass tube in 

 the absence of all protoplasmic connection is of 

 interest in relation to certain of the Calcutta ex- 

 periments. W. R. G. A. 



ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY AND 

 EDUCATION. 



Echo Personalities : A Short Study of the Con- 

 tributions of Abnormal Psychology towards the 

 Solution of some of the Problems of Normal 

 Education. By Frank Watts. Pp. iii. 

 (London : George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1918.) 

 Price 45. 6d. net. 



MANY readers of the voluminous literature 

 upon mental and nervous disorders pub- 

 lished almost weekly in our own country must 

 have been struck by the vast stores of informa- 

 tion for the educationist which these writings con- 

 tain. The significance for education of much of 

 this information lies chiefly in the fact that it tells 

 the teacher what to avoid, but an almost equal 

 amount is grist of the finest quality for his own 

 particular mill; for many of the painstaking and 

 NO. 2594, VOL. 103] 



minute analyses of these states of mental twisted- 

 ness are but the prelude to a subsequent process 

 of re-education. Here, if anywhere, may the 

 educator of the normal child help and find help. 



While, as we said, many persons must have felt, 

 all this, few have ventured upon the task so cour- 

 ageously undertaken by Mr. Frank Watts, that 

 of refracting the rays of light from the dense and 

 clouded medium of psychopathology into the 

 somewhat clearer atmosphere of normal educa- 

 tion. And if one feels, here and there, that an 

 important ray fails to get through, there is little 

 justification for grumbUng at the properties of 

 our prism, for it is almost the only one we have. 



Mr. Watts has read widely ; he leads us from the 

 early giants of rational mental treatment, Pinel 

 and Esquirol in France, and Conolly in England, 

 to our contemporaries — whose height we cannot 

 yet measure, perhaps because they stand too close 

 to us — Janet of Paris, Freud of Vienna, and Jung 

 of Zurich. In his chapter on " Psychopathology 

 and Personality," which seems to us the best in 

 the book, he gives clear little sketches of the 

 typical "nervous" disorders, never forgetting 

 that the blessed word "abnormal " does not 

 exempt him from the obligation of showing their 

 near relationship to "normal " eccentricities and 

 weaknesses. 



In his chapter on "The Crowd at School " he 

 boldly acknowledges the existence of a fact — often 

 protectively coloured, but nevertheless angular 

 and unyielding when one strikes against it — that 

 suggestion is the means by which most of the 

 child's beliefs are inculcated. He draws from this 

 the obvious conclusion that the teacher's duty is 

 to understand the mechanism of suggestion and 

 thereby to utilise its advantages and avoid its 

 pitfalls. It is good to see Mr. Watts making use 

 of that salutarily disquieting book by Mr. Trotter, 

 "The Herd Instinct in Peace and War." But we 

 feel that a still more extensive use of Mr. Trotter's 

 explanation of the present unfashionableness of 

 rational opinion and of his suggestions for making 

 it fashionable in the future might have strength- 

 ened this chapter still more. Perhaps, however, 

 the trouble about Mr. Trotter's "Herd Instinct" 

 is that the title would be improved if he avoided 

 the term "instinct" and used another word in- 

 stead of "herd." Which brings up the subject of 

 Mr. Watts 's own title. On buying the book, one 

 may understand what the title means. But is not 

 this a reversal of the. usual process? 



The final chapter, on "The Psychology of the 

 Defective Mind : its Influence upon Teaching 

 Methods," deals in a very up-to-date way with 

 the subject. One paragraph may be offered to the 

 reader here as food for thought : 



" One may perhaps draw attention here, in 

 passing, to the popular modern educational ideal 

 of self-realisation as the ultimate good. Seguin 

 occupied himself, like Froebel and Rousseau 

 before him, wholly with the problem of the per- 

 fecting of human personality, but a sane study of 

 abnormal psychology should prevent us adopting 

 the unfortunate heresy that personality is the most 



