December 15, 1905.] 



SCIENCE. 



789 



in bringing the therapeutic applications of 

 radium up to 1905 instead of 1904. 



Jacques Danne's ' Das Radium : Seine Dar- 

 stellung und seine Eigenschaf ten ' (Veit and 

 Co., Leipzig, 1904, pp. 1-84) is a little book 

 which those who wish to familiarize themselves 

 with the chemical side of the extraction of 

 radium from its ores may well consiilt. 



Hans Mayer's ' Die JSTeueren Strahlungen ' 

 (Papanschek, Mahr Ostran, 1904, pp. 1-65) 

 is a rather unsuccessful attempt to present in 

 elementary fashion the theory of cathode, 

 canal. Roentgen and Becquerel rays. It is 

 not characterized by the usual German schol- 

 arship, for while it shows wide reading on the 

 part of its author, it contains unpardonable 

 oversights and blunders. 



R. A. MiLLIKAN. 



University of Chicago, 

 November 16, 1905. 



Principles of Physiological Psychology. By 

 WiLHELM WuNDT. Translated from the 

 Fifth German Edition (1902) by Edward 

 Bradford Titohener. Vol. I. London, 

 Sonnenschein ; New York, Macmillan. 

 1904. Pp. xvi + 347. 



One can not but admire the industry and 

 courage of Professor Titchener, who, in the 

 midst of an exceptional productiveness of 

 original text-books, ventures also on a transla- 

 tion of so ponderous and difficult a treatise as 

 that of Professor Wundt on physiological psy- 

 chology. The labor involved and the difficulty 

 of achieving an adequate English version of 

 this important work are, indeed, enormous, as 

 pointed out in a personally interesting preface 

 by the translator. If only the translation is 

 successful in combining the qualities of good 

 English and faithfulness to the- original, the 

 undertaking is certainly meritorious and much 

 to be welcomed by readers who are not dis- 

 posed to cope with the author's German fur- 

 ther than is necessary. And, to judge by the 

 present volume, the translation does in fact 

 fulfil these requirements. It is as readable 

 as could be hoped ; in fact it is probably easier 

 reading than the original, even though the 

 reader should possess equal facility in both 

 languages. The only reservation to be made 



on this score is that, as the translator has 

 adopted the Wilder nomenclature for the 

 nervous structures, most readers will need to 

 familiarize themselves with a good number of 

 new technical terms. It impedes the reader's 

 progress to meet ' myel ' for the cord, and 

 ' cinerea ' for the gray matter. Probably in 

 this matter the translator chose to be a prophet 

 rather than easily read. As to the faithful- 

 ness of the translation, here the reviewer's 

 part becomes a serious one. Without pre- 

 tending, however, to have compared every page 

 of the English with the original, the reviewer 

 can state that he has examined in detail the 

 translation of various difficult passages, and 

 looked up instances where the English sug- 

 gested a possible error, and after all found 

 only a few little slips. One or two rather 

 obvious errors in the original have passed 

 over into the translation, e. g., at page 286, 

 where, quite in contradiction with the context, 

 the brain-weight of a full-grown orang-utan 

 is given as only 79.7 grams. 



A curious error appears in Eig. 79 and in 

 the accompanying text on page 187. It was 

 transferred from the original, and was appar- 

 ently not passed by the translator without 

 question. The figure purports to show the 

 connection of the retinas with the cerebral 

 hemispheres, but errs in connecting the right 

 half of each retina with the left hemisphere, 

 etc. ; the nerve fibers from the nasal half of 

 each retina are stated to pass to the brain 

 without crossing, while those from the tem- 

 poral halves cross — just the reverse of the 

 truth. As the figure is credited to Vialet, the 

 reviewer looked up Vialet's original figure, 

 and found a rather complicated drawing, 

 which had been simplified by Wundt. In the 

 process of simplification, Vialet's diagrams of 

 the retinas dropped out altogether, and their 

 place was taken by some diagrams of the 

 monocular fields of vision which Vialet had 

 placed in front of each eye to show the crossed 

 relation obtaining between the field of view 

 and the retina, due to the crossing of the rays 

 of light within the eye. Wundt's confusion 

 of the retinas and the fields of vision in the 

 figure led him to reverse the true relations in 

 the text. The error is rather amusing — espe- 



