Psychology and Primitive Culture: By F. C. Bartlett, M.A., Fellow of St. John's College, Reader in Experimental Psychology, and Director of the Psychological Laboratory in the University of Cambridge. (Cambridge University Press, 1923. Pp. xii + 294. Price 8 s. 6 d.)

This book is an attempt to deal with the elaboration and diffusion of culture among primitive societies in terms of the operation and interaction of certain instinctive tendencies. The tendencies concerned are, for the most part, considered under four main heads:—

• 1Fundamental forms of social relationship, such as comradeship, assertion, and submission.

• 2Other fundamental responses with a specifically social reference, such as the tendencies to conservation and constructiveness.

• 3The specific individual instinctive responses.

• 4The 'group difference tendencies' which are characteristic of a particular community, and which cluster about the social institutions of that community (these institutions and conventions themselves being taken as data so far as purely psychological discussion is concerned).