502 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. LII. No. 1352 



1900, wten he was already nearly seventy; 

 he published the concluding volume, on Civil- 

 ization and History, in 1920. The inter- 

 vening volumes deal in turn with Art, Myth 

 and Religion, Society and Law. The whole 

 undertaking grew out of Wundt's early con- 

 viction that psychological experiment breaks 

 down on the far side of perception and 

 memory, so that the processes of thought and 

 of constructive imagination must be studied 

 by other than experimental means. Hence a 

 " Volkerpsychologie " is, for him, the direct 

 continuation and supplement of experimental 

 psychology. We may dispute his standxwint: 

 we may question whether experiment fails 

 where he makes it fail, and we may question 

 further whether his own social psychology is 

 not rather an application of his individual 

 psychology to the data of social anthropology 

 than the path to a discovery of new psycho- 

 logical principles. We may doubt also 

 whether the time is ripe for generalization, 

 whether there is not more to be gained by 

 intensive labor. But no one who reads the 

 book can fail to pay his tribute of admiration 

 to its unfailing vitality, to its masterful 

 ordering of detail, to its theoretical consist- 

 ency. The "Kultur und Geschichte" ends 

 on a somewhat forced note of optimism, be- 

 neath which there sounds — as how should 

 there not?: — a steady undertone of strained 

 perplexity. Yet it is only here and there 

 that the attentive reader discerns a momen- 

 tary lapse either of style or of logic; the in- 

 tellectual freshness is maintained to the end. 

 The significance of Wundt's whole work, if 

 one tries to svim it up in a sentence, lies in 

 the fact that he is the first considerable figure 

 in the history of thought to attack the prob- 

 lems of science and philosophy from the psy- 

 chological standpoint. Wundt was a bom 

 psychologist; and if others before him had a 

 similar temperament, they had not the same 

 opportunity. Wundt himself struggled into 

 psychology, and never shook himself entirely 

 free either of past philosophical systems or of 

 the all-too-logical biology of the first Darwin- 

 ian time. But he grew with the years : the 

 last edition of the " Physiologische Psycho- 



logie " is better psychology than the first. He 

 has often been compared with Herbert 

 Spencer; he himself would prefer to be con- 

 sidered a modem follower of Leibniz. 

 ISTeither comparison satisfies. Wundt was 

 unique, and we shall not look upon his like 



Edward Bradford Titchener 

 Cornell TJNivEESirY 



ON THE DETERMINATION OF GEO- 



CHRONOLOGY BY A STUDY OF 



LAMINATED DEPOSITS 



In Science of September 24, 1920, a highly 

 esteemed geologist^ has honored the Swedish 

 expedition now studying some of the lami- 

 nated clay deposits of Iforth America with a 

 discussion of its aims and work which seems 

 to call for some reply. 



The main purpose of our expedition may 

 be stated as being less the hope of making 

 new discoveries than a first attempt to apply 

 to the late Quaternary deposits in North 

 America the theories that have been developed 

 in Sweden by many years of extensive in- 

 vestigations. There by systematic measure- 

 ments of certain periodically laminated layers 

 of late Quaternary age we have succeeded in 

 establishing a real, continuous and exact time 

 scale and not merely determinations appli- 

 cable to isolated localities. Of course many 

 and serious difficulties have been met, and it 

 has taken much time — more than forty years 

 — to overcome them all. The latest and most 

 important progress was my discovery, five 

 years ago, that the variation in thickness of 

 annual layers deposited at different places 

 along the same ice border could be identified, 

 even at the greatest distances from which 

 measurements were obtained, local errors be- 

 ing absent. This indicated a common, gen- 

 eral climatic cause. If it can be shown that 

 similar annual variations occur on both sides 

 of the Atlantic, as far as the extension of one 

 and the same climatic zone [can be assumed], 

 it means that the cause must be sought in 



1 Fairehild, H. L., ' ' Pleistocene clays as a 

 chronometer," Science, N. 8., Vol. 52, p. 284, 

 1920. 



