Everywhere. BY A. HENRY SAVAGE-LANDOR. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1924. 2 Vols. Pp. 386. $10.00.

These are the memoirs of a painter and traveler who went "everywhere" and met "everyone." In the amazing, exciting adventures here recounted, only the author's ingenuity and intrepidity saved him from dangers. But we are told, on page 1, that the author early suffered a fall, "and in later years at school my memory played peculiar tricks." The book can be most profitably considered by sociologists as an autobiography illustrating what we may call the "traprock" type of personality. ROBERT REDFIELD

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

An Introduction to Modern Social Problems. By PHILIP ARCHIBALD PARSONS, PH.D., Director of the Portland School of Social Work of the University of Oregon. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924. Pp. xiv+288. $2.50.

The author thus gives his reason for writing the book:

As a student and teacher of applied sociology with a limited experience in the field of social service, the writer has long entertained the growing conviction that there is a certain fund of knowledge regarding the nature and causes of social problems which ought to be a part of the equipment of every person who attempts to deal with them either as a paid social worker or as a volunteer. The material presented in the following chapters has accumulated slowly through a dozen years of classroom effort to provide for students an elementary or introductory course in the nature and cause of social problems.

If one, without knowing much about Professor Parsons' classroom practice, could venture a suggestion, it would be that this course might be a good summary of a course in actual social problems, but as an introduction it supplies a student with a ready-made set of points of view and conclusions, of which there is already a superabundance at the present time. Does not this kind of teaching always produce the doctrinaire type of social thinker? A. E. HOLT

CHICAGO THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

Unmailed Letters. BY JOSEPH ODELL. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1924. Pp. 221. $2.50.

These letters were written but never sent. They are fascinating pieces of self-revelation by a man of keen appreciation and literary charm. It is through material of this kind that we discover "what men live by." A. E. HOLT

CHICAGO THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

Herman Melville, Mariner and Mystic. BY RAYMOND M. WEAVER. New York: George H. Doran & Co., 1921. Pp. xi+309. $3.50.

The life of Herman Melville will appeal to the sociologist because it is the life of a man who could not establish communication with his fellows. Finding his public interested in the adventures of his body, but not of his soul-that nostalgia for the "lands beyond the sun" and for the purity of woman, which, after all, are essentially adolescent-he wrote one last book, an almost incomparable epic of hatred, and retired from the world at the age of thirty-two.

WINIFRED RAUSHENBUSH

Employees' Representation in Steel Works. By BEN M. SELEKMAN. A study of the Industrial Representation Plan of the Minneque Steel Works of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1924. Pp. 293. $1.50.

Employees' Representation in Coal Mines. By BEN M. SELEKMAN and MARY VAN KLEECK. A study of the Industrial Representation Plan of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1924. Pp. 454. $2.00.

These two books are numbers from a more or less extended "Industrial Relations Series" which the Russell Sage Foundation is publishing. The series embodies the findings of a series of research studies dealing with particular cases of "experiment in the organization of relations between employers and employes in industrial enterprises in the United States." Besides the two studies here reviewed, there are announced by the foundation as complete, or in progress at the date of publication of these volumes, the following additional studies: one dealing with the partnership plan of the Dutchess Bleacheries, one with the works council of the Rock Island Arsenal, and one with the employment policies of William Filene's Sons in their store in Boston. To judge from the two examples at hand, the studies should constitute an extremely valuable contribution to the published concrete data available to students of industrial relations, whether the purposes of these students are practical or theoretical. All the formal documents in which the industrial representation plan of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company has been set forth are

supplied in the appendices attached to each volume; and quotations from other significant documentary evidence, and from the verbatim statements of persons interviewed, are included in the text and in footnotes.

Since the two books deal with the operation of the same original plan, in the steel works and coal mines respectively of the same company, they duplicate one another to a certain extent, and the report on the plan as it operates in the coal mines includes much of what is most important from both volumes.

Not the least attractive features of these studies are the way in which trade unionism is handled as a set of objective phenomena to be studied, and the recognition which is made of employees' attitudes and their interpretations of acts of the company officers as significant data to be taken into account in the studies.

These studies are so significant that no student of industrial relations can afford to neglect them.

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

FLOYD N. HOUSE

Taxation and Welfare. By HARVEY WHITEFIELD PECK. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1925. Pp. 269. $2.50.

The underlying question dealt with in this book is the reaction of public taxes upon group life and group values. The method principally employed is theoretic and deductive; however, the author has marshalled considerable statistical evidence in support of his generalizations. Among his practical conclusions are (1) that high taxation is not necessarily an evil, since it may consist of a substitution simply of public for private activity in the realization of human interests, and (2) that highly progressive taxes may increase social values by raising the margin of utilization of the national dividend.

FLOYD N. HOUSE

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

We. By EVGENII I. ZAMIATIN. (Translated from the Russian by Gregory Zilboorg.) New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Pp. 286. $2.00.

Zamiatin's novel We joins that body of modern sociological literature which includes Kaiser's Gas, Capek's R. U. R., and, with certain reservations, the Hairy Ape of O'Neill. He has the same troubled concern

over the tightening grip of the machine on modern life, and the deadening possibilities of the present emphasis on scientific control. In the "United State" which he pictures nine hundred years ahead, science is triumphant and human life mechanized beyond any possible whisper of fancy. The formulas break down for a moment, it is true, and imagination leads its hectic revolution against the god of the sociological machine, but the revolution is stifled and the god preserved. The scientific expedient is simple.

As a novel, We is brilliant, with not a little of the charm of Erewhon. There is much that hints of Dostoievsky's Grand Inquisitor.

JOHN GRIERSON

CHICAGO

Southern Pioneers in Social Interpretation. Edited by HOWARD W. ODUм. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1925. Pp. xi+221. $2.00.

This book contains a collection of sketches by various writers-nine southern leaders-with an introductory chapter by Professor Odum, dealing with present prospects of the development of leadership in our southern states.

The book is interesting and the style attractive. The various sketches, however, are not sufficiently thorough to constitute very valuable material for the sociologist.

RECENT LITERATURE

NOTES AND ABSTRACTS

The abstracts and bibliography in this issue were prepared under the general direction of Louis Wirth, by Mrs. E. R. Rich, Mr. H. D. McKay, Mr. C. M. Rosenquist, Mr. P. E. Martin, and Miss Anna Marie Lainé, of the Department of Sociology of the University of Chicago.

Each abstract is numbered at the end according to the classification printed in the January number of this Journal.

I. PERSONALITY: THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE PERSON

Emily Brontë: The Problem of Personality.-To confine our knowledge of an author to his works is to neglect sources which may help us to know him better. Thus the biographical facts concerning the life of Emily Brontë tell much that cannot be learned from her writings.-Augustus Ralli, The North American Review, CCXXI (March, 1925), 495–507. (I, 1; IX, 5.) C. M. R.

A Quantitative Demonstration of Animal Drive. Of the various drives, hunger is the most easily manipulated. Hunger-driven animals manifest about 60 per cent more restless activity than others, as measured in a modified maze.-J. F. Dashiell, Journal of Comparative Psychology, V (June, 1925), 205–8. (I, 2.)

H.D.M.

Psychoanalytic Studies.-The Nihilist instinct in man: The passion to destroy in order to drive away intolerable boredom is the master passion in the human brain. Death-dealing activities fascinate us. Inhuman nature: In war the cave man supplants the civilized man. War is the emancipation of the semi-civilized modern man from the restraints of conventional morality. Under the direction of the state he does what he could not otherwise do. Rational motives are not the propelling forces in man's conduct. He is dominated by his instincts, to which war gives expression. The cost of war is the penalty for man's vicious inheritance. The illusion of war is the great reality.-S. D. Schmalhausen, Psychoanalytic Review, XII (July, 1925), 295-315. (I, 2, 4; IX, 5.) H.D. M.

Instinct and Desire.-Instincts and desires are not, as McDougall charges, different in name only. Instincts are central factors, while desires are peripheral. Instincts are central dispositions of the nervous system; desires are processes or conditions in some tissue outside of the nervous system which stimulates or excites certain receptors. Knight Dunlap, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, XX (July, 1925), 170-73. (I, 2.) H.D. M.

Heredity and Evolution.-Life concepts have two aspects: heredity, and environment. The chromosome theory, representing the hereditary aspect, has grown to a great theory of life and evolution. It is the backbone concept of the biologist, though other factors or creative principles are also recognized. Environment has a dual influence; its commands being "Thou shalt" and "Thou shalt not."-William Patten, Scientific Monthly, XXI (August, 1925), 122–34. (I, 2.) C. M. R.

Anthropology and the Endocrine Glands.-The influence of glandular secretions on personality has been noted vaguely by various students. Recent careful examination has shown that no disease or disturbance of any glands of internal secretion occurs without corresponding and often striking change in personality. The facts yield two general laws: (1) Internal secretions are chemical substances; and (2) their influences are specific.-L. Berman, Scientific Monthly, XXI (August, 1925), 157-65. (I, 2, 4; VIII, 4.) C. M. R.