No. 391.] REVIEWS OF RECENT LITERATURE. 611 
The results of an extended and valuable anthropometrical investi- 
gation have been recently published by Dr. Ales Hrdlicka, who meas- 
ured and examined the thousand white and colored children in the 
New York Juvenile Asylum and the hundred colored children of the 
New York Colored Orphan Asylum. The object of the investigation 
was “to learn as much as possible about the physical state of the 
children who are being admitted and kept in juvenile asylums. In 
the second place, this study is a part of the general anthropometrical 
work of the author, and thus expected to result in an addition to our 
knowledge of the normal child and of several classes of children who 
are, morally or otherwise, abnormal.” The plan of arrangement of 
the records obtained will show the scope of the work. 1. General 
data on the total of subjects. 2. Detailed study; children in this 
group are separated according to their color, sexes, and ages. 
3. Physical differences between white and colored children of both 
sexes and different ages. 4. Children of different nationalities. 
5. Children without any physical defects, with their family and 
individual histories. 6. Children with five or more physical abnor- 
malities. 7. Vicious and criminal children. 8. Children whose par- 
ents were intemperate, prostitute, or criminal. 9. Children both of 
whose parents are dead. 10. Children one or both of whose parents 
died of consumption. FR. 
PSYCHOLOGY. 
‘‘ The Dawn of Reason.” — Dr. Weir has written an exceedingly 
readable book in his Dawn of Reason, and one important for the 
large results it presents of personal study of the simpler forms of 
life, and of original research upon the nature of their sensory 
processes. As its chief title indicates, the aim of the work is to 
trace back mental traits to their origins, and to point out their 
earliest manifestations in the scale of animal life. 
In ten chapters the author treats the Senses in the Lower Animals, 
to which he adds two auxiliaries, Color-change and the Homing 
Sense; Teleological Reactions, including Simulation of Death; 
Memory, Emotion, Æstheticism, and Parental Affection. 
It is difficult to estimate the value of the author’s results, since 
1 Weir, James Jr, M.D. The Dawn of Reason; or, Mental Traits in the 
Lower Animals. New York, Macmillan. 8vo, pp. 234. 
