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In September 1948 a symposium was held in the California Institute of Technology under the auspices of the Hixon Fund, a grant to the California Institute of Technology from the estate of Frank P. Hixon for the purpose of supporting scientific endeavor 'which offers promise of increased understanding of human behavior'.
To what degree and in what manner this and other similar efforts are successful is difficult to assess at the present time. If it were merely for the purpose of communicating information it would scarcely seem worth-while since there are other more efficient channels of communication. Clearly the advantage of the symposium is to permit discussion. Therefore the value of the project is to be judged by the development of new ideas and possibly inspiration in the discussion. To this reviewer, judging from the discussions presented in the book, it does not seem that too much was accomplished. The questions raised indicate that the participants understood each other quite well; however, in most instances the discussants seemed to be well acquainted with the data that was presented to them, and there seems to have been disappointingly little cross-field application of the data. In certain instances, one has the impression that some members of the symposium came with a fixed point of view, attempted to impose that point of view upon