The Influence of Joy. By George Van Ness Dearborn.  Mind and Health Series, edited by H. Addington Bruce, A.M. Pp.  xviii + 223. Boston,  Little Brown and Co. Price, $1.00.

This volume of the Mind and Health Series is written to the best of themes but falls short of its purpose, because, perhaps, it attempts too much. The author is enthused with his subject and has endeavored to reinforce its presentation by a review of the scientific foundations upon which it rests. In attempting to do all this, to set forth his position,

properly led up to and buttressed by scientific data, and to set it forth with sufficient simplicity to be easily grasped by the lay reader, and to do all this in a matter of thirty thousand words, he has fallen between the horns of his dilemma and given us a presentation which is neither one thing nor the other. The best parts of the book are, by all odds, those portions where he has apparently forgotten his task and spoken his feelings simply and free from its restraints.

It is a good book, it breathes wholesomeness and is of the class of books one likes to see many of in circulation. For the psychoanalyst it offers nothing and in that respect we cannot but feel that the author has missed a viewpoint that would have been decidedly helpful.

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