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This book is intended to orient the student beginning the study of social psychology. There seems to have been a definite field for such a work and it is believed that the author has supplied that need. Professor Sprowls has realized the indefiniteness in which the subject still finds itself as well as the tendency of a nascent science to produce a diversity of schools, so has been less dogmatic than have the authors of some more ambitious dissertations on the subject. Its evolution from the generality of a philosophy to the particularity of a science is briefly outlined and the theories of its founders from Hegel to Allport are concisely summarized. His own point of view is biological and Sprowls believes that the sciences that contribute to social psychology are so definitely based on biology that the former subject is rapidly being removed from the sphere of speculation. Nevertheless he does not believe that social psychology has yet reached the degree of structuralization that it cran dispense with philosophical considerations. Because it leaves out life as the problem he cannot agree that the mechanistic hypothesis offers a complete interpretation of psychology. If the mechanist criticizes Bergson or Freud as metaphysical for postulating an elan vital or a libido Sprowls charges the mechanist with being equally metaphysical, since in the final analysis physiology must be reduced to terms of electrons which are known in data of time and space only. While regarding the assumption of a fundamental life principle or force as feasible in the case of the individual Sprowls is skeptical of the postulation of a social force as an explanation of social movements and progress; if the term force must be used it should be used in a sequential rather than a causal sense. Naturally if the author does not consider the hypothesis of a social force warranted he can find no excuse for that vanishing assumption, the group mind. For descriptive purposes he would speak of mind grou