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The past two decades have seen a growing interest in the application of objective and experimental methods to psychiatry. The term 'experimental psychopathology' has become familiar. As long ago as 1910, Gregor published a book with this title in German but it was chiefly concerned with the possible application of the methods of Wundtian experimental psychology to psychiatric subjects. G. V. Hamilton pleaded for the laboratory approach in his Objective Psychiatry published in 1925. Despite several excellent journal summaries, outside of these two books both of which are now out of date, no major summary of the field has appeared in book form. In the meantime projective testing, conditioned reflex techniques, experimental neuroses in animals, psychosomatic studies, and topological psychology have all developed and show a more or less healthy growth. It is hence with the greatest expectations that a reviewer starts the perusal of a book entitled Objective and Experimental Psychiatry, whose purpose, according to the dust cover, is 'to bring together all the material concerning human behavior which is of an objective or verifiable nature and which may be useful to those particularly interested in experimentation in the fields of psychiatry and the other social sciences'. This is a big order and an important one and the reviewer regrets to report that Cameron's book almost completely fails to fill it.
The plan of the book is logically good and as a blue print leaves little to be desired. After two introductory chapters on the