REVIEWS.
Organism* ct Soctitf. Par RENE WORMS. Bibliotheque Sociol- ogique Internationale, I. Paris: V. Giard et E. Briere, 1896. Pp. 412.
La Pathologie Sociale. Par PAUL DE LILIENFELD. Avec une Preface de Rene Worms. Bibliotheque Sociologique Inter- nationale, II. Paris: V. Giard et E. Briere, 1896. Pp. xlvii + 332.
THE charm of analogy ! What a power it has been in the mental world ! It is simply the imagination taking one of the many directions in which it naturally moves. It is the creative faculty of man which does not always express itself in marble, on canvas, or in measure. It inheres in the man of science as well as in the artist or the poet, and it cannot be suppressed. It lives alike in the savage, the untutored peasant or shepherd, in the half-educated classes of modern society, and in the best stored minds of our day. Think of the poetry that was woven into the early history of the aborigines of America ! and the difficulties encountered by the Morgans, the Powells, the Holmes's and the Brintons in eliminating it ! Most of it was the immediate fruit of this passion for analogies. Whole lives have been spent in demon- strating that the North American Indians are the lost tribes of Israel. Vast labors have been devoted to tracing their languages back to the Sanskrit. Innumerable analogies have been discovered between their ceremonies, customs, designs, and symbolic figures and those of Asia and Egypt. Their comparatively modern Indian origin is proved by the occurrence of the Buddhist cross or swastica, and their Hellenic ancestry by the analogy between the words Potomac and Troraftos !
But the love of analogy is not confined to ethnology. It permeates history and literature and gives us those laborious demonstrations by means of mysterious ciphers and cryptograms that Lord Bacon was the natural son of Queen Elizabeth and wrote the plays of Shakespeare. It penetrates every branch of science, and aside from the wonderful
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