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Professor Bianchi has given us a work which is the result of many years of laboratory research and of careful thinking. He has reviewed all the evidence with the utmost care which points to the function of the frontal lobes, giving also the results of his own personal researches, and concludes that “all that lies in front of the motor field, with the exception of a remnant of the old central organs of smell is the organ where new and powerful conceptions are formed with the material provided by the sensory organs from individual and collective experience of life (interwoven with history, tradition and literature). It is also the chamber of resonance of the somatic ego * * *, it is the throne room of logic * * *.” All human actions he believes are the resultants of two great energies, impulse and inhibition, and there are corresponding to the anatomical disposition of the brain two grades of consciousness, a higher and a lower. He discusses very interestingly the psychoanalytic point of view in a footnote (p. 317.).
The work is well written and well translated and has a foreword by C. Lloyd Morgan. It affords an excellent review of the subject in hand from the standpoint of the laboratory experimentalist who is desiring to find in the brain an explanation of the functions of the mind.
White