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This volume consists of an edited translation of those of Pavlov's writings and scientific addresses which appeared between the year 1928 when he was seventy-five, and his death in 1936. It covers the period during which Pavlov was occupied with the application of the concept of the conditioned reflex to the problems of psychiatry. The speeches and papers are presented as sixteen chapters; some of them mere notes of two or three pages, others as long as twenty-nine pages. Although there is a certain chronological evolution of the ideational content, there is also much repetition and overlapping. Furthermore, most of the papers were addressed to an audience on whose previous knowledge of the subject Pavlov could not count, so that he felt it necessary to recapitulate basic principles in almost every paper. Consequently that which is novel in the content of these lectures could be condensed into a shorter, clearer exposition. In fact, the translator's thoughtful twenty-four page introduction contains most of the meat of the subsequent lectures, and makes one wish that instead of a reverential rendering of the lectures themselves he had organized the material in the form of a concise, and logical text. It is important, of course, that the full text of the protocols of original experiments should be available in English; but unfortunately these lectures, like so much of the available data on the work of Pavlov, are not protocols and are scarcely detailed enough for critical analysis, nor systematic enough to constitute a cogent presentation of the material in a running story.
Just as Anrep's book is a better basic text for the serious student