450 BOOK REVIEWS 



Chapters iv and v, comprising 81 pages, include The Elementary 

 Facts about the Neuro-physiological Basis of Action and The Organs 

 of Response: Muscles and Glands. These two chapters (like those 

 which precede them) are, of course, merely the scaffolding for the 

 psychological structure and in the Preface it is stated that they can be 

 omitted without injuring the continuity of the text. "It is realized 

 that only the specially interested [and qualified, it may be added] 

 student will master them." 



The reviewer has had considerable experience (not all of it gratifying 

 to his complacency) in teaching the anatomy and physiology of the 

 nervous system to students of psychology with meager biological 

 preparation, and he is convinced that few pedagogical problems offer 

 more of difficulty and that few present so large an assortment of 

 miserable failures. The attempt to teach details of brain anatomy, 

 including conduction pathways, etc., without actual and prolonged 

 laboratory contact with the material is futile. This Doctor Watson 

 recognizes (p. 113). 



It remains true, however, that there are very numerous neurological 

 subjects of great importance from the behaviorist's standpoint which 

 can be presented in untechnical form without the encumbrance of the 

 benumbing jargon affected by the neurologists. The student of 

 elementary psychology would probably be very little interested in the 

 fact that the central canal of the spinal cord and the fourth ventricle 

 communicate at the foramen of Magendie (p. 126), even if it were true; 

 but he has a legitimate curiosity about reflex patterns and their mech- 

 anisms, the significance of final common paths, the apparatus of sum- 

 mation and reinforcement, the integrating values of sympathetic, 

 spinal, bulbar, thalamic, and cortical centers, and a host of other topics 

 which can be simply explained in plain English and which have very 

 obvious " behavioristic" significance. This kind of elementary neu- 

 rology has not yet been written and the author who succeeds in doing 

 it will perform a real service. 



The chapter on the nervous system is not well organized from the 

 functional point of view and is unfortunately marred by a number of 

 errors which would be serious if the readers were expected to take the 

 chapter seriously. The discussion of the organs of response is better 

 written, though it will certainly prove hard reading for students with 

 little preparation in anatomy and physiology. 



"Human action as a whole," we read (p. 194), "can be divided into 

 hereditary modes of response (emotional and instinctive), and acquired 



