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The title of this monograph is rigorously correct if one restriction is noted: only two sensations, vision and audition, are considered in the book. The title is otherwise exact, for within these two fields the author has concerned himself with physiological changes, and attendant theories, resulting from quantifiable changes in amplitude and frequency of visual and auditory stimuli. This is to say he has limited himself strictly to problems customarily classified as sensory as distinct from perceptual.
The author explains in his preface his failure to consider skin, olfactory and gustatory sensations, by deferring to von Skramlik's classical monograph on taste and smell, and to J. P. Nafe's summary of the state of general sensibility published in Murchison's Handbook of General Experimental Psychology. Taking Mr. Rawdon-Smith's explanation at its face value, and remembering the excellent publications already in the field of vision and audition, it is easy to ask why he did not excuse himself from writing altogether. Such a question, however, is unjustified. For while the book falls somehow between the two stools of a short, semipopular summary and a complete, concise, critical review of recent work in these two fields, it nevertheless has a definite contribution to make. It is the shortest, not too technical survey available of recent experimental literature considered in relationship to auditory and visual theories.
However, even this specific contribution is further limited—if not actually weakened—by the author's bias toward a modified Young-Helmholtz theory of vision, and toward a modernized Helmholtz resonance theory of audition. While this bias does not cause Mr. Rawdon-Smith to distort pertinent experimental facts, it does lead to a constriction of the experimental points considered.