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This is a very thorough and scholarly survey of the history of concepts of reflex action from Descartes in the early seventeenth century to the present day. In so far as the history of psychological concepts enables us to use them more clearly and consciously, this volume will render that service admirably to those concerned with physiological psychology. The book is not of great interest to psycho-analysts as such, touching hardly at all upon their particular problems. There are a few references to somnambulism, dreams and automatism, and to the various attempts that have been made to represent these states in terms of reflex action. In the last chapter, on modern concepts, the author sums up the general trend of present-day thought about physiological psychology, and takes his own stand with Koehler and Koffka in their emphasis on the need to consider reflexes in relation to all the concomitant events in the integrated nervous system. He quotes Koehler's recent criticism of the behaviourists: 'If I feel a little disappointed by the work of behaviorism, the reason is not so much a certain innocence in its treatment of direct experience and in its imitation of adult physics, but its astounding sterility in the development of productive concepts about functions underlying observable behavior. As an imitation of physics it is scarcely a satisfactory achievement for the behaviorist to have taken the old concept of reflex action from physiology (including the reflexes of inner secretion) and to give us no further comprehension into the formation of new individual behavior than is offered by his concepts of positive and negative "conditioning". Why should behaviorism be so utterly negativistic in its characteristic statements? "Thou shalt not acknowledge direct experience in science" is the first commandment, and "Thou shalt not conceive of other functions but reflexes and conditioned reflexes" is the second'. It is extremely