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This is one of the most valuable books on the biology of sex we have ever come across. The author is a highly competent biologist with an exceptional power of presenting technical matter simply and lucidly. All psychologists would profit from his remarkable presentation of the latest knowledge concerning such topics as sexual reproduction, Mendelism, sex hormones, parthenogenesis, etc. It would be a pleasure to quote and discuss passage after passage were the scope of this JOURNAL a different one. Special attention should be directed to the chapter on the 'abnormalities of sex' in animals, which have a distinct bearing on some human problems.
We could have nothing but praise for this book if only it consisted of its first nine chapters. Unfortunately the author has been impelled to add a tenth chapter dealing with various social, medical, anthropological and psychological problems, where he is clearly out of his depth. This chapter painfully contrasts with the high scientific level maintained in the rest of the book. He attempts to forestall criticism by the following piece of generalization, one which will fall very flat to workers in these other fields: 'The foregoing part of this book, resting as it does on a solid basis of fact, contrasts markedly with this last chapter, the greater part of which is concerned with social anthropology and psychology. In these two sciences, particularly the latter, there is a large amount of hypothesis and relatively little fact'. The difficulty surely is not the smallness of fact, but the ill-digestion of the enormous masses of fact that exist. The author falls into the usual errors of being naïve in the face of complexity, dogmatic in the face of problems as yet unsolved, and badly informed where exact knowledge exists.
The word 'psycho-analysis' occurs once in the text, and the author has evidently attempted to digest something of the subject. We note, however, that the 'list of books dealing with sex problems' at the