840 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXII. No. 832 



script partly prepared. It is therefore to 

 be hoped that this part will soon follow and 

 thus the entire order of Coleoptera be covered. 

 The edition was limited to one thousand 

 copies and, we understand, is practically ex- 

 hausted. It is to be hoped that a revised edi- 

 tion, in generally available form, will soon be 

 forthcoming. With the general demand for 

 a work of this character there should be an 

 extensive sale for the work for many years to 

 come. 



Frederick Knab 



Leitfaden der experimentellen Psycliopathol- 

 ogie. Von Adalbert Gregor. Pp. 222. 

 Berlin, S. Karger. 1910. M. 6.80. 

 In this book the author attempts to give, in 

 a series of sixteen lectures, the applications of 

 the methods of experimental psychology to the 

 study of mental diseases. Considering the 

 limited amount of literature of experimental 

 psychopathology, and the still more limited 

 extent of its established fact, it would appear 

 a difficult task to produce a book of such scope 

 with strict adherence to its subject, nor is it 

 accomplished save through the inclusion of 

 much detailed analytical discussion. The 

 single topics are treated quite distinctly in the 

 successive lectures, and in another edition it 

 will be well if page and chapter headings are 

 provided for the text and bibliography. A 

 very critical introductory chapter is followed 

 by another of equal merit on the time sense, 

 of which the author has himseK made some 

 pathological studies. The chapter on reaction 

 time is also well constructed, but these three 

 lectures set a standard that is scarcely reached 

 elsewhere in the book, save perhaps in the 

 seventh and eighth, on memory, and in the 

 fourteenth, on the involuntary expressive 

 movements. The chapters on association give 

 only the merest elements of the question at 

 issue, and the two chapters on Aussage might 

 well have been condensed. One might, as a 

 psychopathologist, also criticize the sense of 

 proportion that gives two indifferent chapters 

 to Aufmerksamkeit and but one to voluntary 

 movement — practically confined to discussion 

 of the ergograph and the Schriftwage. The 



questions of the work-curve in the higher men- 

 tal processes are discussed in the fifteenth lec- 

 ture, while the last deals with measures of 

 intelligence — without a mention, even bibli- 

 ographical, of Binet and Simon. 



The seven pages of bibliography are never- 

 theless useful, for while they omit a good deal 

 that the psychologist would ordinarily know 

 of, as Hoch's pathological work with the ergo- 

 graph, the studies of Kramer and of Wolfs- 

 kehl on memory, and of Vogt or Alechsieff on 

 feeling, it contains a good many titles of im- 

 portance not apt to be familiar to the worker 

 whose horizon does not extend well beyond the 

 literature of normal psychology; examples are 

 the too little known studies of Eanschburg on 

 memory, and the various papers of Gregor 

 himself. 



In a general treatise, equal merit through- 

 out could be achieved only by an equal lack 

 of it, and the author has probably done what 

 he tried to do as well as any single writer on 

 the hither side of Kraepelin could have done 

 it. And yet the book suffers from an under- 

 lying fault in conception that to the psycho- 

 pathologist win go far indeed to outweigh all 

 its virtues. It is the last weakness that one 

 would expect in a physician, accustomed to 

 clinical contact with actual cases. The book 

 seeks not only to translate the methods of 

 normal psychology into pathological terms, 

 but also its problems. Now normal psychol- 

 ogy has its well-defined problems, as the reader 

 of this journal knows them, but it recks little 

 of such pressing questions of psychopathology 

 as the experimental criterion of confusion, the 

 distinction between retardation and blocking, 

 or the differential psychology of hallucinosis. 

 To the psychological reader, the volume would 

 scarcely give a hint that such questions ex- 

 isted. It is a doubtful service to explain how 

 various methods of normal psychology, adapt- 

 ed to its own special problems, can be tried on 

 pathological cases, too. It were a very real 

 service to discuss the various psychotic symp- 

 toms in their appropriate clinical settings, and 

 to explain the application of psychological 

 methods to their further elucidation. Here 

 the book fails grievously ; and one can not but 



