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This study by the former Dean of Radcliffe College, serial no. 3 of the Mental Measurement Monographs, is in refreshing contrast to the many arid books on the various aspects of mental testing that continue to come from the press. Dr. Boody has done her work thoroughly and gives us reviews of immigration laws and “reviews of certain articles and statistics” from the time that Edward Young made his “Special Report on Immigration” in 1871 down to the immigration reports of 1923. But she has used this material so skillfully that we forget we are reading dry statistics and find them really fascinating. In addition there is a chapter on “Review of the Procedure at Ellis Island” which is remarkable for its sympathetic insight into the problems of both the immigrant and the immigration official. The report of Dr. Boody's own work with immigrant children occupies the last fifty pages of the book.
For two months in the summer of 1922 and again in 1923 the author had, as she says, “the privilege” of being every day at Ellis Island. “To gain some knowledge of two things seemed (to her) specially important.” First “the kind of human material that the countries of the world were sending to the United States. The second was the kind of human material that the United States was accepting. It was of interest