! NEW BOOKS. 271 effect of suggestion upon perspectivity (with school-boy observers) made by the writer at Clark University. Other and later experiments are con- cerned with the effect of practice on perspective presentations, the dura- tion and alternation of perspective reversions, the distance equation of black and white rods, the influence of continued fixation, etc. An elaborate historical review has been prefixed to the experimental studies ; and the book ends with a chapter on theory, in which the psychophysical or 'perception* theory is upheld against the psychological theory of ' judgment '. The author's aim, throughout, is completeness. The historical survey " purports to be an exhaustive digest of all that has been said and done along (sic) the subject treated " ; " the utmost historical fidelity is attempted " and the treatment is strictly chronological. So with the experiments : " the attempt has been made to give full Tables, rather than mere excerpts, summaries, 'typical,' 'general,' or ' representative' values". While the present reviewer must confess to sympathy with this point of view, he cannot but feel that the writer, in his adoption of it, himself shows a lack of perspective. The five historical chapters, for example, bring together materials which, after all, are for the most part easily accessible to any one who wishes to find them, but which might, in large measure, remain buried without any special loss to psychology. Besides, no summary, however complete, can take the place (except for its author) of recourse to the original literature : it is the workers at secondhand who will profit by these chapters. Where, on the contrary, completeness would be really valuable in the writing out of introspec- tions and in the correlation of the experimental results with earlier obser- vations the book confessedly falls short (pp. 96 f.). The author has been obliged to publish at his own expense : which means, presumably, that publishers' readers have adjudged the work to be unsaleable or scientifically inadequate. The former, no doubt, has been the motive which determined rejection. But there can also be no doubt that the writer would have done better, first, to print his experi- mental records in some technically psychological journal, and then to work up his final chapter, in the light of his historical knowledge, into a separate article or possibly into a small book. This chapter contains good work, constructive and critical, and with aid from the initial chap- ters might have been made extremely interesting to the general reader. While, therefore, the reviewer heartily admires the pluck and determina- tion with which Dr. Wallin has worked, he cannot approve the judgment shown in the chosen mode of publication. E. B. T. Biographic Clinics, vol. iii. : Essays Concerning the Influence of Visual Function, Pathologic and Physiologic, upon the Health of Patients. By G. M. GOULD. Philadelphia : P. Blakiston's Son & Co., 1905. Pp. viii, 516. The first two volumes of Dr. Gould's Clinics, reviewed in MIND, xiii., 130, 432, attempted to show that the ill-health of certain distinguished men was the direct effect of eye-strain. The present volume contains two further studies of this kind, devoted to J. A. Symonds and to Taine ; but the greater portion of the book is made up of papers, reprinted from medical magazines, in which the author's views are confirmed by illus- trative cases, the theories of opponents are examined and their objections met, and recommendations are offered in matters of school hygiene. A newly written Introduction sums up the evidence to 1905. Then follow articles on the new ophthalmology and its relation to general medicine,
