Child Psychology: Edited by Charles E. Skinner and Philip Lawrence Harriman in collaboration with twelve contributors. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1941. 522 pp.

This work is so thoroughly a textbook in pattern and so instructional in style that only the authors could hope for an audience

outside the field of education. At that, they may have to depend largely on the acquiescent audience tied to required reading. The content is a synthesis of the work of others. The climax is a precise outline, exhaustive enough to invite quick cramming.

Chapter headings cover such broad divisions as physical growth and mental growth, emotional development and social development. Subdivisions are provided for in chapters devoted to language, character, and religious development. Personality development, maladjustments and mental hygiene are jumbled into one chapter. There are separate discussions of heredity and early development, and the exceptional child. The indivisibility of human beings presents difficulties to any psychologist, but when the neat categories of assumed divisibility are allowed to stand for the whole the result is artificial.

Testing programs and rating scales are described but scarcely evaluated. Externalized explanations for behavior are extolled. A simple twist of the environment and presto, all is well again. One of the editors disposes of the psychoanalytic theory of ambivalence and with it, Freud, in a footnote. 'Most psychologists find this concept of ambivalence to be based on mere armchair theorizing and speculation.' Two hundred pages later, a daring contributor teeters far enough off the line to state that 'in the young child's life love and anger are closely allied'. Fantasy is shied away from in six lines on daydreaming. Similar slights or total omissions could be listed by the score but none is as conspicuous as the lack of any reference to children's humor.

Editorial instructions must have included an order to keep reader interest through copious use of illustrations. Pages are studded with case notes on Lavinia and her ilk. Little Lavinia turns up in a paragraph on 'the development of desira