of Directors, to succeed Professor A. S. Hershey. Chapters of Alpha Pi Zeta are now active at Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota, and Northwestern universities, and other chapters are under consideration. Chapters are established only in universities in which graduate work in the social sciences is well established.

The First American Health Congress.-For the first time in the history of public health in America, those who are doing the work itself will meet together and view it as a whole when the American Health Congress convenes in Atlantic City, May 17-22. This Congress has been the goal of the National Health Council, 370 Seventh Avenue, New York City, since its formation in 1921, and will reveal the vast strides in co-ordination of effort and co-operation that the Council has brought about for its member organizations during the last five years.

Cornell University.-Professor Dwight Sanderson is spending the year in Europe, studying rural organization with particular reference to the village. In October he attended the meeting of the International Institute of Argiculture at Rome. Professor B. L. Melvin returned from Europe in September. He spent the preceding summer in studying village life in Alsace-Lorraine. He is now completing his study of rural population trends in New York State.

Professor L. L. Bernard will leave in February for Argentina, where he will spend several months studying the development of the social sciences there, particularly with reference to the economic, political, and social conditions which have influenced their development.

Dartmouth College.-The second semester's course in elementary sociology has started with an enrolment of 481 men, divided into twenty sections. Mr. J. E. Woodward, who was added to the staff for the first semester as an instructor, returned to Columbia University upon the return of Professor E. B. Woods, who has been on sabbatical leave from the college. The total enrolment in courses given in the department during the current year is the highest which has yet been reached.

Northwestern University.-The Institute of Land Economics and Public Utilities, formerly at the University of Wisconsin, has been transferred to the School of Commerce at Northwestern University. It remains under the direction of Dr. Richard T. Ely, and its staff become members of the Northwestern University faculty. The work of the Insti

tute includes experimental laboratories in housing and other socialeconomic problems.

Mr. Howard Becker is fellow, and Miss Alice Q. Rood, scholar, under the Wieboldt Foundation Grant. Mr. Becker is studying the sociological aspects of bereavement, and Miss Rood has analyzed a group of records in the Public Health Institute.

Mr. William F. Byron, executive manager of Hull House, is giving three courses in the department, on Population, The Field of Social Work, and Public Health.

Yale University. The Sterling Fellowships for Research in the Humanistic Studies and the Natural Sciences have been established by a gift of one million dollars from the Trustees of the Estate of the late John W. Sterling to stimulate scholarship and advanced research in all fields of knowledge. They are open equally to graduates of Yale University and other approved colleges and universities in the United States and foreign countries, to both men and women, whether graduate students, or instructors or professors when on leave of absence, who desire to carry on studies and investigations under the direction of the Graduate Faculty of Yale University. The Sterling Fellowships are divided into two general classes: Research or Senior Fellowships with stipends of $1,000-$2,500, and Junior Fellowships with stipends of $1,000$1,500. Candidates for Research or Senior Fellowships must have the Ph.D. degree, or must have had such training and experience in research as are indicated by this degree. Candidates for Junior Fellowships must be well advanced in their work toward the Ph.D. degree. Applications for these fellowships should be addressed to the Dean of the Graduate School of Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, on blanks which may be obtained from him. Applications for the Junior Fellowships must be submitted by March 1, and applications for the Senior Fellowships by April 1.

BOOK REVIEWS

Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade. By HENRY PIRENNE, of the University of Ghent. Translated from the French by Frank D. Halsey. London: Humphrey Milford Oxford University Press, 1925. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1925. Pp. 249. $2.50.

London Life in the XVIIIth Century. By M. DOROTHY GEORGE (Mrs. Eric George), Late Research Scholar of Girton College and The London School of Economics and Political Science. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925. Pp. xi + 452. $6.50. The Color of a Great City. BY THEODORE DREISER. New York: Boni and Liveright, Inc., 1923. Pp. xiv + 287. $3.50. Around the World in New York. By KONRAD BERCOVICI. New York and London: The Century Co., 1924. Pp. 416. $5.00. Paris of Today. BY RALPH NEVILL. New York: George H. Doran Co., 1925. Pp. 320. $6.00.

The Taming of the Frontier. BY TEN AUTHORS. Edited by Duncan Aikman. New York: Milton, Balch & Co., 1925. Pp. XV+319. $3.00.

The city has been described as the natural habitat of civilized man. Culture is regional and has its roots in the soil; but civilization is a product of the city. The city has always been a melting pot of races and of cultures, and the social ferment that resulted has been reflected in a more vivid, intense, and intellectually stimulating life. Of this ferment, civilization is the product. Books on the city are interesting from various points of view. They are interesting to the sociologist when they faithfully reflect and describe city life, and especially when they explain it and make it intelligible.

Medieval Cities, translated from the French of Henry Pirenne, reproduces the substance of a series of lectures delivered in America in the fall of 1922. Within the space of some 249 pages the volume offers a scholarly and at the same time concise account of the origins of the modern city. Most of the cities in Europe came into existence in the period

from the ninth to the twelfth centuries. Previous to that time there were no cities, generally speaking, in Europe. They are a by-product of the revival at this time of international trade. Mere colonies of traders at the outset, they have never lost their original cosmopolitan character. Industry, capitalism, and internationalism-all that is characteristic, in fact, of modern life-have had their rise in these medieval cities. Here are the origins of modern life.

Books on London are legion. But London in the eighteenth century has added measurably to our knowledge of that great metropolis. Since Charles Booth's Life and Labour of London, no book more interesting and more instructive has been written in this field. From a multitude of obscure sources the author has been able to construct a realistic picture of the life of London's labor classes in the age preceding our own.

In the eighteenth century the London which Booth sought to describe at the end of the nineteenth, was just coming into existence. All the problems with which we have since become familiar were as yet neither defined nor understood. Social sciences and most of the agencies through which the nineteenth century has sought to reconstruct its social life did not exist. It is an interesting period and interesting history; the history of obscure people living obscure lives, not yet fully aware of their common interests and not yet able to formulate and advocate their own

causes.

One interesting fact brought out by this survey is that during all this time, with some setbacks due to local conditions, the life of the laboring masses was steadily improving, and this is all the more interesting because the publications of charities and the pamphlets of reforms, as Mrs. George points out, have given quite the opposite impression.

The volume by Konrad Bercovici, Around the World in New York, and the volume by Theodore Dreiser, The Color of a Great City, present the metropolis-this time not London but New York-in a different manner and with a different emphasis. It is not the problems but the life of the city that these books seek to portray, since what they describe is what any reporter might have seen in wandering about the city, and, as Dreiser puts it, "never weary of seeing how the other fellow lived." Bercovici is himself not merely a reporter but a cosmopolitan, a man who has lived intimately with many peoples and in many lands. He has had the fancy of revisiting in New York the peoples he has known abroad. Huddling together in odd corners of the city, seeking to preserve in the new world some shreds and memories of the life in the old world which they have left behind, these alien colonies are after all perhaps the most

characteristic feature of the American scene. In the foreign restaurants and in the foreign quarters of New York he has found samples of the peoples and cultures of all the world, not merely of Europe, but of Africa and of Asia. And in African New York he has discovered among other things an Abyssinian colony, its members calling themselves black Jews, and worshiping devoutly in their synagogues after the manner of their Hebrew co-religionists.

The scenes and incidents of this varicolored life of the new world are quite equal in interest to anything that has been written of city life at any time or anywhere. But Dreiser's sketches have the quality of literature. And this is because Dreiser, in all his observations of New York, is concerned not with the problem of the city but with the problem of life. Quite different in interest and in quality are the books by Nevill, The Paris of Today, and the volume of which Aikman is the editor, The Taming of the Frontier. Nevill's book is a chatty account of Parisian life, but does not add much if anything to the long list of volumes that have preceded it. It is Paris of the restaurants and the boulevards which mainly interests him, and he writes about the manners of the city familiarly and gracefully, in the style of a raconteur, and of one who has known Paris "for forty years."

The Taming of the Frontier, though it deals with ten different cities, has a single consistent theme. What these sketches record is the incredible changes in manners and customs and in the general outlook on life which have taken place in the West in something like sixty years. The "wild west" was wild enough, if we can believe these accounts, while it lasted. What is incredible is that the change should have been so complete and so sudden. Here are ten sketches of American life written in the vivid, vigorous, and racy English of the American newspaper, and it is safe to say that never before has so much been said in regard to America in the same number of words.

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

ROBERT E. PARK

Das schweizerische Taeufermennonitentum. BY ERNST H. CORRELL. Tuebingen: J. B. Mohr, 1925.

Mennonitisches Lexikon. Edited by CH. HEGE and CH. NEFF. Frankfurt a. M., 1913, Vol. I.

The history and sociology of the Swiss Mennonite Baptists, by Professor Correll, now of the Mennonite College in Goshen, Indiana, was begun in the schools of Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch, to whom it is