The Physical Basis of Personality. By Charles R. Stockard, Professor of Anatomy and Director of the Anatomical Laboratories and the Experimental Morphology Farm in the Cornell University Medical College. New York:  W. W. Norton & Co., Inc. Pp.  320, including Bibliography and Index. Illus.

This book from the pen of the able and well known Professor of Anatomy at Cornell University is a welcome addition to our library. Pr. Stockard has for years been noted for his work in experimental evolution, and to have incorporated some of the results of this work in a volume is to have contributed a handy reference to his ideas, which are otherwise scattered in the literature of many journals.

“The Physical Basis of Personality” is somewhat of a misnomer if one has in mind personality from the point of view with which the psychoanalyst is dealing, for the relation between personality and bodily structure which interests Professor Stockard is much too remote as a rule for his consideration. The general differentiation into types according to Kretschmer has interested the psychiatrist, to be sure, but when it comes to the specific problem represented by an individual case he has not found it particularly valuable. However that may be, anything that Stockard chooses to write is worth reading, not only because it comes from Stockard but because it comes from the mind of a man who has spent his life dealing with biological problems, and dealing with them in the broadest sort of way so that his thinking has been dominated by a breadth of view which naturally results in his thought overlapping here and there the thought of those whose fundamental interest is in other spheres. Without undertaking to critically evaluate the different aspects of this work it may perhaps be as well to refer to certain of the ideas that are set forth which might conceivably be of special interest to those engaged in psychiatric or psychotherapeutic undertakings.

In the first place, it is always interesting to realize that there is a microcosm as well as a macrocosm, that one does not have to go to the astronomers to find facts expressed in numbers followed by many ciphers. In calculating mathematical probabilities that any particular individual should have come into existence, based upon the p