The Origin and Nature of the Emotions. By George W. Crile, M.D., Professor of Surgery, School of Medicine, Western Reserve University, Cleveland. Octavo volume of  240 pages with  76 illustrations. Philadelphia and London,  W. B. Saunders Company, 1915. Cloth, $3.00 net.

A work of great importance to all who are especially interested in the emotions. Psychoanalysis has always placed more weight upon the emotional side of life than upon the intellectual, but its work has been confined to psychological levels. Crile's work is the work of the laboratory investigator with a large clinical experience and is written from the physiological standpoint and expressed in symbols at the physicochemical level. This work, coupled with certain neurological correlations—thalamic syndrome, etc.—serves to tie up the psychological, the so-called functional, with the organic, the physical, chemical, and neurological, and from this viewpoint is a work in a field that bids fair to become of supreme importance, especially as the work in vegetative neurology goes forward. It is a field of work that the psychoanalyst can not afford to neglect.

A few quotations will show the broad, comprehensive and especially genetic approach of the author to the problem of the emotions and serve at the same time to give a fair idea of what the reader may expect to find in the work.

“With this conception, the human body may be likened to a musical instrument—an organ—the keyboard of which is composed of the various receptors, upon which environment plays the many tunes