788 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XVir. No. 437. 



tion, defining homology, analogy, etc., and de- 

 scribing protoplasm, the cell, etc., and men- 

 tioning some names and dates in the history 

 of zoology, the rest of the book is arranged 

 according to the present classification of ani- 

 mals, beginning with the Protozoa, and sys- 

 tematically discussing systematic zoology with 

 orders and sometimes suborders for units. 

 The systematic consideration of the Metazoa 

 is preceded by a fifty-page discussion of the 

 tissues, organs and development of the many- 

 celled body. 



Where all animals are touched on none can 

 be adequately considered. Text-books of zool- 

 ogy which get in the name of every order of 

 living animals are misnamed ; they are diction- 

 aries of systematic zoology, catalogues of the 

 animal kingdom. The beetles, of which there 

 are 12,000 known species in North America — 

 and how many thousand in the world ? — with a 

 variety of form and habit comparable in extent 

 with that of the endless pattern pictures of a 

 busily handled kaleidoscope, get one page and 

 one figure of this book. Three fourths of this 

 page are given to dividing beetles into four 

 suborders. Wliy not make it one line, and be 

 more truly and just as effectively a catalogue 

 and less a pretense of being something else? 

 The rest of the page could then go to the 

 needed expansion of the account of the special 

 structure and physiology of the class of insects. 

 The student who is going to study beetles be- 

 yond the name Coleoptera has no possible use 

 for one page and a subdivision into four sub- 

 orders. He must have thirty pages and half 

 of the families if he is to go a single step for- 

 ward in their systematic study, or as many 

 pages as he can have, with no subdivision, if 

 he is to get a glimpse of their life and habits. 

 The author, in trying to get all the animals 

 catalogued in his ' Lehrbuch,' makes of it no 

 text-book at all, and a sort of catalogue vastly 

 inferior to a professed synopsis like Leunis's. 

 V. L. Kellogg. 



L'Hypnotisme ei la Suggestion par le Dr. 



Orasset. Paris, Octave Doin. 1903. 8vo. 



Pp. 534. 



The culmination point of the contributions 

 to the literature of hypnotism was reached 



quite a number of years ago. There was a 

 period when the contributions to this topic 

 quite overshadowed those to any other division 

 of abnormal psychology. Dessoir issued in 

 1890 a supplement to his bibliograjihy of 

 hypnotism first issued in 1888, and recorded 

 nearly four hundred titles to the credit of 

 these two years.* The more recent contribu- 

 tions that have been comprehensive in scope 

 have likewise been more selective in purpose. 

 Some have been devoted to the analysis and 

 description of the psychology of suggestion; 

 others to the therapeutic applications; others 

 to the analogies between that and other states 

 normal and abnormal. As a number of the In- 

 ternational Library of Experimental Psychol- 

 ogy now appearing in fifty volumes under the 

 editorship of Dr. Toulouse, there has appeared 

 a volume on ' Hypnotism and Suggestion,' of 

 which the author is Dr. Grasset, of the Uni- 

 versity of Montpelier. As the representative 

 of this library, the volume on hypnotism will 

 command wider attention than would be ac- 

 corded it as an independent contribution. 



It can not be said that the volume, though 

 it compares favorably enough with many 

 others that have appeared, really adds much 

 of note or illumination to the present status 

 of the subject. It does, indeed, bring for- 

 ward with a fair sense of their relative im- 

 portance the several problems that are most 

 worthy of attention in contemporary psychol- 

 ogy. It wisely dispenses with much intro- 

 ductory or historical matter, which in former 

 eompends found a somewhat undue place. It 

 recognizes that the fundamental problem, the 



* Beginning with 1896, the number of entries 

 for this group of topics in the ' Psychological In- 

 dex' is 51, 84, 154, 143, 77, 35, 35, 28. These 

 numbers are not comparable, since the falling off 

 in the more recent years is in part due to a sub- 

 division of the topics that bring ' Hypnotism ' 

 into a separate division in the later but not in the 

 earlier years. Parallel with this, there is some 

 widening of the scope of the ' Index ' since its 

 foundation. None the less, the ' Index ' shows the 

 general falling off in the productiveness of this 

 topic. Such falling oft' is a welcome consumma- 

 tion, so far as it represents the cessation of wordy 

 and unorganized — not to say amateur — contribu- 

 tions. 



