A History of Experimental Psychology. By Edwin G. Boring.  The Century Co., New York, 1930. Pp.  699.

Here we have the first comprehensive history of experimental psychology, written by a competent and careful psychologist. The science itself is so young that its entire life-span is well within the memory of persons now living; yet there are today so many “psychologies” that no one man can specialize in them all. Professor Boring has written the history of his own specialty, whose independent existence, marking the birth of psychology proper, began in the 1860's. Nevertheless, nearly half the volume is taken up in tracing the lines of descent of the new science, through philosophy on one side and the experimental physiology of the early 19th century on the other. Approximately 100 pages are devoted to the founding of experimental psychology, from Fechner's Elemente to G. E. Müller who celebrated his eightieth birthday not long ago and who is still “a power and an institution” despite the fact that some 1930 graduates in psychology may scarcely have heard of him. Some 200-odd pages follow, dealing with modern experimental psychology. Here we find the other psychologies discussed, temperately and judiciously as becomes the historian, who nevertheless reminds us that almost all the new schools have been founded as a protest against some one or other characteristic of the psychology of Wundt, the founder of experimentalism. The concluding portion of the text, some 60 pages, is devoted to a general survey of the subject, giving us a birds-eye view of the development of experimental psychology from Fechner down to the present, which begins with 1910 and receives brief notice, chiefly because it has seen the rise of such important schools as Gestalt and Behaviorism. These movements,