The Lie Detector Test: By William M. Marston. New York: Richard R. Smith, 1938. 179 pp.

One is of two minds in offering an appraisal of this book by Marston: whether mainly to emphasize the unquestionable fact that in its presentation of dramatic cases and with its insistence on the provable value of lie detection tests in many fields it does carry its theme convincingly, or whether to be vigorously critical of the journalistic tone which is applied to highly important matters in the management of human beings. However it must be confessed that the book, just because of the manner in which it is written, is likely to attract a vastly greater number of readers than is the thoroughly scientific presentation of the same subject by John A. Larson (Lying and Its Detection, a Study of Deception and Deception Tests, University of Chicago Press, 1932).

Is it because Marston has taken to contributing popularized psychology to syndicated newspaper columns that he believes in such a production, or is the New York Daily News writer to whom Marston makes prefatory thanks largely responsible? Anyhow some of the material, such as the story of Adam and Eve, so liberally cited at the beginning of the first two chapters, could be relegated to a Raised Eyebrows Department. Much credit is generously given to God for his 'scientific' solution of the mystery of the hiding and nakedness in the Garden of Eden—'that little detective mystery' that 'has come down to us in all known languages and literatures'! The reviewer may be stupid but he fails to read in the second and third chapters of Genesis any evidence of lying except that Jehovah himself misrepresented