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This book presents a great contrast with the one by Baker on the same topic which was recently reviewed in the JOURNAL (Vol. VIII, p. 430). Although Dr. Crew is evidently also a master of his subject, he has none of Mr. Baker's exceptional powers of easy and sympathetic presentation. Indeed, the book makes decidedly heavy reading. The author is completely unsparing towards his reader and rarely deigns to explain most abstruse technical terms. The dryness and heaviness of style, however, are not due to any lack of clearness in thought, but to a passion for rigidly accurate statement and an uncompromising attitude towards the audience. The following sentence will illustrate what we mean by this: 'They (Lipschütz, etc.) have shown conclusively that for the complete differentiation and maintenance of the sexual phenotype active functional gonadic tissue is essential; that a male possessing testes, because the embryonic gonads assumed the testicular organization for the reason that they were XY tissues and developed in the initial internal environment of maleness, becomes a phenotypic male because the testes exhibited a certain specific kind of physiological activity, elaborated a specific male "sex-hormone", which greatly reinforced the initial internal environment of maleness, and exerted, during the critical period of their development, a directing stimulus that evoked a ready response on the part of the remaining structures of the sex-equipment, so that they pursued their differentiation according to the male type of sexual architecture'.
The book is, in short, one for experts in the subject. The greater part of it deals with the Mechanism of Sex-Determination and the Physiology of Sexual Differentiation, the three remaining chapters being on Sex-Reversal in the Adult Individual, The Mode of Inheritance of Sex-Dimorphic Characters and The Sex-Ratio.
While those, who, like psycho-analysts, are working at the various scientific problems concerning sex, have to kee