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This book belongs to a category of which there have hitherto been very few examples in psychological literature. There is an almost embarrassing choice of general text-books, a great number of treatises dealing more or less systematically with some general branch or aspect of psychology, e.g. experimental, educational, medical, industrial or animal psychology, while still other volumes are expositions from the point of view of schools, psycho-analysis, individual psychology, behaviourism, Gestalt, etc. The viewpoint adopted in the present work is quite different, the investigations reviewed having been 'selected on the basis of their psychological importance, their adaptability to the requirements of detailed exposition and their interest to the student'. The 'general reader', however, is also catered for, and it is for him presumably that terms 'possibly unfamiliar'—e.g. 'introspection', 'psychiatrist'—are explained, as they occur (though, curiously enough, he is supposed to be familiar with the significance of coefficients of correlation, p. 390).
There is no doubt that the method adopted, in spite of its absence of systematic foundation, is eminently successful. The book can be confidently recommended to the intelligent general reader who is anxious to know what experimental psychology is about (though he should, at the same time, be warned that it is very far from being representative of the whole of modern psychology, or even of the whole of experimental psychology). The fact that each of the twenty-eight chapters is complete in itself makes it a far less serious undertaking for the reader than a systematic text-book, which must be mastered as a whole; at the same time, each chapter will enlarge the reader's understanding of the standpoint and methods of the experimental psychologist, of the problems that he tackles, the difficulties he encounters, and the degree of success that he achieves. To the student of psychology and the psychologist von Beruf the b