for comparative reference. A carefully compiled index also adds to the value of the English translation.
John Grier Hibben.
Princeton University.
Professor Groos's works on play have been so widely read since their first appearance in German, that it is unnecessary to do more than recall in the briefest manner the contents of Die Spiele der Menschen, now appearing in translation. The author's psychological criterion of play is that the activities and capacities involved in it shall be exercised purely for the sake of the resulting pleasure; his theory of its biological significance is that it represents preparatory, 'experimental' exercise of various instincts essential to adult life. The bulk of the work is given to an interesting discussion and classification of human games and sports with reference to the different powers and impulses whose exercise they involve.
It is an ungrateful act to criticise a translation; the translator's task is always an unselfish and laborious one. But in the present case the reviewer cannot omit to mention the fact that many rather serious errors mar the work. When we read on page 232 of the translation that Sully and Ribot attempt to combine the two theories of the comic, that of the feeling of superiority and that of contradiction, "by deriving the more refined sense of superiority from the first exaggeration, progressively excluding the latter by mental play with contraries," we are not exactly enlightened. Turning to the original we find that the passage read: "Sully und Ribot suchen sie in der Weise zu vereinigen, dass sie das tnumphirende Gejühl der Ueberlegenheit als die pimitivere Erscheinung auffassen, aus der sick erst [is this the 'first' of the translator's rendering] mit der Zeit die jeinere Freude am Komischen entivickelt habe, wobei das Ueberlegenheitsgejühl immer mehr von dem intellectuellem Spiel mit dem Widersprechenden verdrängt worden sei" Further, on page 362 of the translation, Spencer is reported as follows: "It is characteristic of nervous processes, he says, that the superfluous integration of ganglion cells should be accompanied by an inherited readiness to discharge." One wonders what the force of 'inherited' may be here, until on consulting the original one finds that it is an übennässige Bereitwilligkeit to discharge, with which the ganglion cells are credited, and that there is no trace of any word in the sentence which could possibly have suggested 'inherited.' In the case of the following blunder the operating psychological causes are more apparent: on page 375 we read, "the longer this natural education continues, the more vivid do the inherited capacities become." The word translated 'vivid,' to the utter destruction of the sentence's meaning, is 'bildsam'—not pictorial, but plastic, a not unnatural confusion of the arts. A number
