416 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVII. No. 950 



hold for all fields — an error common to nearly 

 all books on this subject. And many other 

 errors have been noted, most of them pertain- 

 ing to the theory of instruments. 



As in many other books, great use is made 

 of the magnetic shell. In the reviewer's opin- 

 ion magnets of all types, real or fictitious, but 

 especially the magnetic shell, should be com- 

 pletely abolished from the fundamental parts 

 of electrical theory — as indeed they have al- 

 ready been abolished by some writers. The 

 reviewer must protest also against the author's 

 use of the word field, which properly denotes 

 a region, to designate field strength or field 

 intensity; and the use of the word force in 

 place of the word stress when two forces — 

 both action and reaction — are contemplated. 

 These usages are all too common, and the 

 book under review is no more guilty than 

 many others. 



In spite of such defects as have been men- 

 tioned it may be stated again that this is a 

 good book. And it should be useful to many 

 students. S. J. Barnett 



The Ohio State University 



The Science of Human Behavior: Biological 

 and Psychological Foundations. By Maurice 

 Parmelee, Ph.D. New York, The Macmil- 

 lan Company. 1913. Pp. xviii -\- 443. 

 $2.00 net. 



It is the subtitle rather than the main title 

 that indicates the scope of this work, which 

 might perhaps have been better named pro- 

 legomena to a science of human behavior. No 

 attempt is made to gather together the rather 

 extensive studies of human behavior already 

 produced by experimental psychology, and 

 indeed the existence of this work is not even 

 recognized, nor are its methods set forth. 

 The author's view is that human behavior 

 must be approached from the biological and 

 physiological side. " Psychical and social 

 phenomena should be reduced as far as pos- 

 sible to biological terms, just as vital phe- 

 nomena should be reduced as far as possible 

 to chemical and physical terms " (Preface) . 

 " To begin the study of behavior from a bio- 

 logical point of view has, I believe, a very 



wholesome effect, for it necessitates the use 

 of more or less exact methods of observation 

 which are not always used in psychology and 

 sociology. The use of these methods results 

 in the disappearance of hazy and mystical ex- 

 planations of human phenomena frequently 

 proposed by 'writers in these two sciences. 

 These explanations are replaced by more or 

 less exact mechanical explanations " (pp. 2-3). 

 The nature of these mechanical explanations 

 is indicated by the author's method, which 

 seeks to obtain clear concepts of the simpler 

 types of behavior, and then to show how these 

 simpler acts are combined into more complex 

 behavior of a mental and social sort. The 

 method is, therefore, comparative and ge- 

 netic; and phylogenetic rather than ontoge- 

 netic. Tropisms and other reactions of the 

 simplest organisms, refiexes of animals pos- 

 sessing a nervous system, instincts, which are 

 defined as combinations of reflexes integrated 

 by the nervous centers, learning, intelligence, 

 consciousness, society, are successively treated ; 

 and some attempt is made to trace the evo- 

 lutionary process through these increasingly 

 complex modes of behavior. As might be ex- 

 pected, this attempt to trace the phylogenesis 

 of human behavior is not specially successful, 

 on account of the impossibility of selecting a 

 series of animal forms representing the direct 

 line of human descent; and the study is thus, 

 after all, comparative rather than genetic. 

 For example, considerable attention is de- 

 voted to the social behavior of insects and of 

 birds, which certainly has no direct bearing 

 on the evolution of human behavior. For the 

 specific purpose of the book, much of this inci- 

 dental material might well be replaced by 

 something on the growth of behavior in the 

 human individual. 



The book is of the Speneerian type, begin- 

 ning with the characteristics of matter in gen- 

 eral, and ending with social evolution. It 

 has required the bringing together of material 

 from various sciences : physics and chemistry, 

 zoology, physiology, psychology, anthropol- 

 ogy. One would expect it, accordingly, to be 

 broad rather than notoriously exact; and it is 

 likely to produce the same sort of impression 



