Contraception (Birth Control)—A Manual for the Medical and Legal Professions: By Marie Carmichael Stopes, D.Sc., Ph.D. [with introductory notes by other authors]. (John Bale, Sons & Danielsson, London, 1923. Pp. xxiv + 416, 4 plates. Price 12 s. 6 d. net.)

Without doubt this is the best book on Contraception that has appeared. Its description of the various devices employed is full, and each one is discussed at length, though not always in a critical spirit. This may perhaps be explained, though not excused, by the author's apostolic attitude to the subject—it is a Cause, and as such must be defended.

In a manual for the medical and legal professions the author should

In a manual for the medical and legal professions the author should give her readers more detailed observations on which to base conclusions. She is quite right when she says;

proper study of contraceptive methods may bring to light features of general interest to all branches of medicine (p. 156),

but such features will only be brought to light if the study is properly critical. As an example of the author's method, we may take this statement:

There is no doubt whatever that some fully sexed and roused women do experience the interlocking of the glans penis with the cervical canal (p. 139) [Reviewer's italics].

This seems highly improbable in view of the fact that no dilator fibres have been observed in the cervix, that dilatation under anæsthetics takes twenty minutes when rigid metal dilators are used, and that even then the lumen is only large enough to admit a finger. The partners to the act, 'when fully sexed and roused', are in a state when accurate observations are most unlikely. Further, the high threshold for stimulation usually found in the cervix must suddenly be changed to a low threshold if the author's statement is correct, and a new factor would have to be reckoned with in our genital theories.

Another novelty is a hint at a correlation between the hydrogen-ion concentration of the vaginal secretions and the intellectual development of the individual. Thus:

The reactions of the vaginal secretions in different women, and in the same woman at different times, vary enormously. Roughly, I class them for my own consideration into three main gr