604 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. II., No. 39. 



this reference to Homer, has iiuwittinglj' chosen 

 the worst possible illustration for his purpose, 

 quite apart from his supposed quotation : for 

 Homer does indeed tell us, in one passage (in 

 the last book of the Od3-ssey), about the death 

 of Achilles ; but that passage informs us of 

 a seventeen-days mourning of gods and men 

 over the hero, with funeral ceremonies of ex- 

 traordinarj- ^)lendor, that would have done 

 the dead man's heart good if he could onlj' 

 have been there to see. Nobody doubts Ho- 

 mer's simplicity, but Dr. Maudsley wholly^ 

 misapprehends what it means. How he could 

 have been so deceived in his quotation, we can- 

 not guess ; but such gratuitous blunders show 

 us what to expect of a man that can make 

 them. 



If we have little space left to refer to our 

 author's discussion of matters that he is emi- 

 nentlj' competent to discuss, that is not our 

 fault. On the pathology of the will we receive 

 instruction in the brief space before spoken of. 

 Of hereditj' of mental disease we here find some 

 illustrations, but we learn nothing new about 

 the obscure subject of the actual laws that 

 govern heredity. As to mental disease and its 

 phenomena, Dr. Maudsley insists with consid- 

 erable emphasis upon his view that the will, 

 and in particular the most developed activitj' 

 of the will, as seen in the moral consciousness of 

 the civilized man, is the least stable, because the 

 highest and latest element of man's mind, 

 fiud must therefore show the signs of deeaj' 

 and disease soonest. This, he assures us, is 

 actuallj' the case. He illustrates his position 

 by means of a good many instances of certain 

 forms of mental disease. The view is not ab- 

 solutelj' novel, and Dr. Maudslej' has described 

 most of the facts before. But all this is well 

 worth telling, and would have made a useful 

 essaj- if the rest of the book had reached the 

 fire instead of the printer. As it is, this part 

 of the book is the only one from which a stu- 

 dent of such psychology as Dr. Maudsle.y so 

 well describes in his preface can learn any thing 

 of importance that is in any sense novel. 



Our task in reading and reviewing has been 

 no pleasant one. With Dr. Mandslej' we hope 

 for a psychology of ' concrete minds,' that may 

 teach us " why individuals feel, think, and do 

 as they do, how thej- maj- be actuated to think, 

 feel, and do differentlj', and in what way best 

 to deal, with them so as to do one's duty to 

 one's self and them " We see in the humblest 

 experimental researches conscientiouslj' con- 

 ducted, in evevy observation of the mental 

 pathologist, in ever^- advance in nervous physi- 

 ologj', in everj' new discovery in animal psj'- 



chology, and, let us freely add, in every fruitful 

 philosophic research into the deeper problems 

 of thought, in all these things, not only aids, 

 but necessar}' conditions of the approach to the 

 great end thus delined. But we also see in 

 vague rambling disquisitions de ovmibus rebus, 

 such as nearly fill this book ; in efforts at phi- 

 losoph3' b}' a man who is confessedly and verj' 

 manifestly unable to understand philosophic 

 terms, who ignores the history of thought, and 

 who insists upon writing pages of contradictory 

 statements, — in all this we see, not advance, 

 but serious injury. And when not only the book 

 is such as it is, but also the author is a man 

 whose position and previous services command 

 respect, and who is therefore able to call the 

 attention of busj' students to whatever he maj- 

 choose to publish upon the suliject, — then we 

 say^ that such conduct is a serious breach of the 

 privileges of authorship, and we wish to raise 

 a decided protest against it. For the rest we 

 have no quarrel with the author's determin- 

 ism, nor with his materialistic basis for mental 

 science, so long as he confines both the doc- 

 trines to their only proper sphere ; that is, em- 

 plo3-s them as regulative principles in discussing 

 and explaining the facts of experience. We 

 quarrel onlj' with his confused and purposeless 

 fashion of discussion. 



NOTES AND NEWS. 



— The report of the committee of the Geodetic 

 association was presented at a general meeting of 

 the conference, Oct. 23, at Rome, and was adopted 

 after an animated debate. The report favors the 

 universal adoption of the Greenwich meridian, and 

 also recommends, as the point of departure of the 

 Universal hour and cosmopolitan dates, the mean 

 noon of Greenwich. The conference hopes, that, if 

 the whole world agrees to the unification of longi- 

 tudes and hours by accepting the Greenwich meridian, 

 England will advance the unification of weights and 

 measures by joining the metrical convention of 1S75. 

 The government of Italy will be requested to officially 

 communicate the foregoing action of the conference 

 to all nations. 



— In the October number of the Harvard tiniver- 

 sily bulletin,, further instalments are given of the 

 geographical index to the maps in Petermann's tnit- 

 theiluncjen, by Mr. Bliss, and of Mr. Winsor's 'Bib- 

 liography of Ptolemy's geography,' containing im- 

 portant notes on early American cartography. Mr. 

 Winsor also commences an account, of which six 

 pages are printed in the present number, of the Kohl 

 collection of early maps in the Department of state 

 at Washington, prefacing it with a brief account of 

 Dr. Kohl's labors. 



In the official portion of the bulletin, we find the 

 following appointments gazetted: Arthur Searle as 



