Febkuaky 19, 1909] 



SCIENCE 



301 



Taken as a whole, the work is well and log- 

 ically written and fairly accurate in facts and 

 figures. It is a work which will be read with 

 interest by both technical and non-technical 

 readers, and especially by those interested in 

 the financial aspect of money and metals. 

 Walter E. Crane 



On the Witness Stand: Essays on Psychology 

 and Crime. By Hugo Munsterberg, Pro- 

 fessor of Psychology, Harvard University. 

 Pp. 269. New York, The McClure Co. 

 1908. 



Professor Miinsterberg writes as the cham- 

 pion of a cause. A new science is taking 

 shape. Fifty laboratories are its servants. 

 It is applied psychology (p. 9). Education, 

 medicine, art, economics and law are its nat- 

 ural fields; but the obdurate lawyer bars it 

 out of the last. 



The reader of these essays, who is familiar 

 with the practise of courts, will question if the 

 author gives them siifficient credit for the 

 rules which they have themselves worked out 

 to aid them in the search for truth. His 

 criticisms are addressed to those in which the 

 trial is by jury, and there is no examination 

 of the accused by the presiding judge. The 

 American juryman is commonly of more than 

 average education and ability, else he would 

 not be found upon the panel. Among twelve 

 such men there will be those who have met, 

 not only the ordinary, but some of the extraor- 

 dinary experiences of life. They all know 

 what strong emotion is. They are no strangers 

 to the force of temptation, of suggestion, of 

 the association of ideas. They are in one 

 respect, and that an important one, more com- 

 petent to weigh the value of testimony than a 

 professor of psychology, because they are 

 nearer to the ordinary witness in character 

 and circumstance. They have learned from a 

 lifetime of buying and selling, of giving and 

 obeying orders, of hiring and discharging, of 

 hearing news and telling news, how difficult it 

 is for two men to see or understand a thing 

 in exactly the same way, and how impossible 

 it is for them to describe it exactly in the 

 same way. 



The lawyers and judges, too, have been 



schooled in certain rules of evidence. Pro- 

 fessor Miinsterberg is wrong when he says- 

 (p. 22) that they hope to get the exact truth, 

 when they ask some cabman how much time 

 passed between a cry and a shot. They know, 

 and the jury know, that what seems to some 

 a space of minutes, will seem to others, and 

 perhaps with better reason, a space of seconds. 

 Witnesses may differ on the size or length or 

 form of a field, " and yet," says the author 

 (p. 33), "there is no one to remind the court 

 that the same distances must appear quite 

 differently under a hundred different condi- 

 tions." He would have the psychologist inter- 

 vene, and explain all this to a dozen men 

 whose every-day experience has taught it to- 

 them from boyhood. 



So when he declares (p. 44) that " the con- 

 fidence in the reliability of memory is so gen- 

 eral that the suspicion of memory illusions 

 evidently plays a small role in the mind of 

 the juryman " and cross-examining lawyer, he 

 discredits their intelligence on quite insuffi- 

 cient grounds. 



Professor Miinsterberg would have witnesses 

 examined by a psychologist (pp. 46, 62) with 

 regard to their powers of perception and mem- 

 ory, their faculty of attention, their lines of 

 association, the strength of their volition, and 

 their impressibility by suggestion. He does 

 not tell us whether he would have this exam- 

 ination take place in or out of court. If in 

 court, it is obvious that it would greatly mul- 

 tiply the questions for the jury to decide, and 

 be mainly unintelligible to them except as 

 supplying a basis for the examiner's ultimate 

 conclusions: if out of court, it would involve 

 wearisome statements, probably from more 

 than one expert, of the experiments tried, and 

 open the way to a still more wearisome cross- 

 examination. In either case, the prospect of 

 submitting to such an ordeal would make 

 many men and more women unwilling to tes- 

 tify in court, and so tend to dissuade them 

 from letting it be known that they are cog- 

 nizant of material facts. 



The author urges a resort to the association- 

 test, or the automatograph, in the case of those- 

 charged with crime; saying that (pp. 82, 124,. 

 132) a guilty man, of course, will not object,. 



