1896.] Psychology. 847 
despite the fact, that in his main illustration Prof. Edinger falls into 
one of the glaring fallacies into which this sort of analogy between body 
and mind may lead. He says there are certain creatures (fishes) which 
have no hemispheres, and it follows that, on the psychological side, we 
must deny to these creatures “all that the hemispheres are necessary 
for in the higher creatures.” This overlooks the great principle that, 
in the lower forms, less differentiated structures may do what more 
differentiated ones do in the higher forms. To press this point con- 
sistently, he would seem to have to deny consciousness altogether to 
these fishes. The lesson of this paper, however, is a most timely one; 
psychologists, especially in Germany, are not half awake to the genetic 
problem, and when they do awake, no doubt it is true that the richest 
lessons that the physiology of the nervous system will have to teach 
them will be derived from such comparative study as Prof. Edinger 
advises. 
Several papers of general interest were read in the open meetings. 
The President’s address was rather more severe and wissenschaftlich 
than the earlier addresses of the presiding officers have been, but it 
was an exceedingly interesting and discriminating review of theories 
on the connection of mind and body. The arraignment of Parallelism 
was very effective—possibly more so than the positive doctrine of the 
paper. Prof. Ebbinghaus of Breslau gave a new way of testing the 
mental condition of school children at different periods and in different 
conditions of fatigue, etc. It differs from the methods already in vogue 
in that it endeavors to test the child’s correlating or apperceptive 
faculty rather than his sense-perceptions or his memory. The method, 
which teachers will find extremely interesting, consists in taking a 
passage from some interesting narrative-text, and, after striking out 
various words and phrases and printing the passage with black spaces 
where these erasures have been made, telling the child to fill in the 
spaces as he thinks the sense requires. This requirement certainly calls 
upon the child for more than memory, and the results of its application, 
as reported by Prof. Ebbinghaus, seem to show its superiority; but it 
would appear to be applicable to children of a more advanced age, after 
the memory tests are outgrown. This general judgment, however, I 
must make with reservation, since the synopsis of the paper did not 
reach my hands. This may suffice to indicate the scope of the method, 
and to call the attention of our educational authorities to it. They will 
also be interested in Prof. Ebbinghaus’s severe criticism of what he 
called the “American method ” of testing the mental condition of school 
children by the memory tests. 
