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conscience and involves no hurt to another or violation of contract, it is sacred and sacramental whether it be exercised within the limits of wedlock or outside of them."

In attempting to show the truth and validity of this principle he discusses the problems of abstinence, prostitution, masturbation and phantasy. Abstinence is defined as absence of coitus, masturbation, and of any phantasies which show sexual feeling. "To say 'Be abstinent or marry' may be but offering the choice between two impossibilities," and he thinks that when that is so the Church should be prepared to "throw its influence into the scale of the highest practicable alternative for such people."

The position taken up by the author is that "all those practices which while gratifying man's sensuality afford no basis for love, but rather hinder its coming...are morally bad," whilst "love is the best thing in human life and the way to love is through lust-i.e. sexual feeling for another person, with desire for its natural expression." "If you fear lust too much" he says, "you will lose love and remain the slave of sensuality." He speaks approvingly of the liaison between equals as a temporary or permanent form of sexual relationship and holds that it is not necessarily immoral, but, on the contrary, may be definitely uplifting.'

The views expressed by Mr Milburn are probably not very unusual, but they are unusual as coming from a clergyman and in the attempt to reconcile them with the principles of Christian Ethics.

T. W. M.

Manual of Psychiatry: for the Medical Student and General Practitioner. By PAUL E. BOWERS, M.S., M.D., Examiner in Lunacy, State of California. Published by W. B. Saunders Company, Philadelphia and London, 1924. Price, Cloth, 18s. net. Octavo of 365 pp.

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It is a pity that a firm of the reputation of Messrs Saunders and Co. should publish such a book as this. It is intended to appeal to the student and general practitioner for whom it should serve as a reference handbook." Those students who are likely to be examined by the author may find it advisable to read it, if only to learn his peculiar views; for others it is not only unsatisfactory but often actually misleading. Its arrangement is poor, far too much space is given to accounts of alleged typical mental states in physical and toxic conditions, differential diagnostic accounts which should be put in comparative tables to be of any use are strewn over pages making rapid reference impossible, and there is no sense of proportion in the allotment of space to common and rare conditions.

To enter into details of the sins of omission and commission would not be worth while and would occupy space better reserved for worthier books. Of the former the most glaring is the complete omission of any reference to the malaria treatment in General Paralysis of the Insane-not to mention the more recent work done with the Rockefeller Institute's new preparation, tryparsamide. Of the latter, the definitions of neurological and psychological terminology and symptoms are full of gross errors, too numerous to quote. Even the Babinski reflex is incorrectly described as are also echolalia, depersonalisation, the Ganser syndrome, delusions, and obsessions.

The author would appear to have drawn his practical experience chiefly from mental defectives and prison psychotics. The chapter on the relationship of insanity to crime is the best in the book. But even here the author shows his previously declared bias for the physical etiology of mental disease, and while paying lip service to psychological factors in causation fails to deal satisfactorily with them. In the toxic psychoses due to drugs he ignores entirely the view that many of these, including dipsomania, are forms of compulsion neurosis, having a psychological etiology and being amenable to psychotherapy. He states that 25 per cent. of the admissions into institutions are cases due to syphilis. The English figures from 1909-1920 are 9-10 per cent. of males and 1.4-1.7 per cent. females.

For the student the book is misleading; for the general practitioner illarranged and cumbersome, while the psychiatrist will find it thoroughly unsatisfactory.

M. R. BARKAS.

The Emotions, Morality and the Brain. By C. V. MONAKOW (Zurich). Washington, D.C. 1925. Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Co., Monograph Series, No. 39. (Translated by GERTRUDE BARNES and SMITH ELY JELLIFFE.) Pp. iii + 95. Price, $2.00 net.

The author attempts to make long morphological-biological and historical developments a broad connecting link between morals and the brain. He approaches the former subject by way of philosophy, and the latter from his own renowned researches in cerebral localization. Many books of this character are easy to read but difficult to understand, unfortunately the work before us is both difficult to read and to understand; the former is due to the translation, the latter to the fact that the author employs some of his terms vaguely. Thus he divides the whole material of psychic phenomena (sensation, perception, emotion, in their reciprocal influences and successive blendings), that is, the life interests, into four categories: (a) The true self-preservation of the single individual (true only for infancy). (b) Maintenance of the species (libido, sex). (c) Maintenance of the tribe or the more limited group (love of home). (d) Relations of the individual to all humanity, and to the world in general (infinity, eternity, fate, God, etc.).

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As a sub-heading in the second category he mentions "emotions of the immediate present with regard for the past and the future (up to the most intense passion): vows of love, dreams of happiness, longing, impulses to court, desire for domestic happiness and for maternal love, love of children, etc.," and as an example of the fourth category: "inner religious composure,' adoration of the Highest, bliss, fervor, rapture, glorification, gratitude towards the Highest, God and Nature worship, inner illumination, religious ecstasy. This he contrasts with "indifference, swearing, emotional conviction of being damned, psychic pain, self-reproach, up to overwhelming contrition, dread, anticipatory fear, foreboding of misfortune," and so forth and so on. The three pages devoted to this tabulation of contrary emotions, instincts and moralities are more confusing than instructive.

The chief difficulty in reading and understanding the book lies in the nature of the translation. This is a good example: "The 'exposed film' that is being

wound from the beginning of the individual life, filled from separate experiences, its vitally numerable, uniform rotary motion-within due range-the continuity, to be sure, not wholly uninterrupted, and often changing with reference to the affectivity, and for that reason assuming different values in conformity with the nature of the subjective, very divers estimations. From this in the course of time the personality or character of the individual becomes crystallised." I will close this unsatisfactory review of an unsatisfactory translation by quoting the last two paragraphs of the translator's preface, merely adding that the bewildered reader is not even provided with a reference to the name, place or date of publication of the original, so that if his curiosity has been roused in spite of the translators, he has to search through catalogues before he can place an order for the German text. When the translation is a good one, the bibliographical reference may conceivably be superfluous. When the translation is a bad one, it may be the only useful item in the book. Be that as it may, the translators say in their own defence:

"That indefinable tendency of the English language to simplify and almost to emasculate the psychical tension of German thought has been here resisted and we leave the matter in its apparently confused form, although we have wished, for many reasons, that we might have presented this fascinating monograph in a simpler and more easily readable form. Inasmuch as this work appeals more specifically to those whose intellectual capacity and fundamental training, neurologically speaking, is of the most highly developed form, we have comforted ourselves that this simplification was perhaps unnecessary."

J. R.

NOTES ON RECENT PERIODICALS

Zeitschrift für Sinnesphysiologie.

Band 56, Heft 2 and 3.

Ueber die Lokalisation der Empfindungen bei den niederen Sinnen. (Emil V. Skramlik.) In view of the scanty knowledge in regard to localization in taste, smell, temperature and pain the author carried out observations on ten subjects (including himself). The investigation sought to determine:

(a) The accuracy with which the point of stimulus could be recognized (i.e. absolute knowledge).

(b) The measure of accurate differentiation between two points of stimulus. 1. Taste. (a) The distribution of the papillae on the surface of the tongue, fairly regular in children, is extremely variable in adults and most asymmetrical. (3) The physiological reaction varies for stimuli applied to large or to small surfaces.

When different substances are applied in solution simultaneously to the right and left halves of the tongue their locality can be recognized: sensations of taste are localized and exactitude depends upon the individual, the spot and the degree of concentration of the substance. Differences between two stimuli applied simultaneously at different spots are recognized as in the sense of touch.

2. The sense of smell cannot be localised.

3. The sense of temperature is as delicate as that of touch; it is subject to certain individual and topical variations. The sense of pain is topically the least delicate of all dermal sensations. Absolutely and in differentiation the order of the senses as regards localization is sight, touch, temperature, smell, pain.

Beitrag zur Lokalisation von Schmerzempfindungen. (B. Mayer.)

The recognition spatially of painful stimuli is inferior to that of pressure stimuli. For both recognition, absolute and differential, are topically parallel.

Experimentelle Untersuchungen zur Psychologie und Psychotechnik des Visiervorgangs. (Hubert Hildebrandt.)

Experiments to determine phenomena that occur in sighting objects placed at varying distances; the phenomena cannot be entirely attributed to physical causes. The diplopias are astigmatic and in a sense physical but even here certain psychological influences are at work. The nature of the stimulus and the proximity of the stimulus to the retina condition their effects. If two objects are approximated to one another there are changes in the contours tending towards a composite symmetrical figure. The form of an object effects the composite figuration of its astigmatic multiple images. A definite proximity of objects in the field of vision conditions in irregular astigmatic lenses the loosening of the multiple images.

Fragmente über das Sehen im Traum. (Dr Jakob Streiff.)

A description of the visual phenomena occurring in his own dreams to which the writer has paid attention for about a year. He distinguishes hypnagogic hallucinations from true dreams. Generally his dreams occur in a peculiar dream light; sometimes a kind of twilight, sometimes a peculiar artificial light. Nightmares usually occur in gloomy light, recalling the gloomy anxiety of childhood. The peculiar light is perhaps due to the sensations from the closed eyes. Occasionally it is broad daylight in the dream, even when the dreamer woke up in the middle of the night. Persons and things rarely have their natural size in dreams; persons are often bigger; dream scenes often seem to be on a stage and a little remote. This is usually due as Freud says to reminiscences of childish experiences or sometimes to recollections of

appearances of scenes and persons in later years. Dream hallucinations of presentations are generally deficient in the finer details. A study of dream pictures leads up to a comparison between the mental processes involved with those of eidetics. The work of Galton and Jaensch is quoted in support of these resemblances. Freud's perceptual system is criticised since experiences with eidetics and with hypnagogic hallucination show that a part of our perceptions need not originally attain to consciousness; indeed we only become conscious of a part of the perceptual stimuli in each act of perception.

The eidetic anlage is most marked before puberty, an interesting fact in view of Freud's discovery of the importance of the infantile life in dreams.

Band 56, Heft 4.

Ueber die absolute Erkennung des Ortes eines Druckreizes bei normaler und anormaler Lage der Haut. (R. Kawakami.)

Experiments with four subjects to determine the absolute local signatures in normal and abnormal positions of the skin (raising the skin). Absolute recognition of pressure stimuli remains unchanged.

Ueber Entfernungstäuschungen im Gebiete des Drucksinnes. (R. Kawakami.)

When two stimuli are applied to the skin drawn in an abnormal position illusions occur as to the distance separating the stimuli. The subjective distance is midway between the objection separation and that in the normally placed skin.

Ueber die Lokalisation zweier gleichzeitig erzeugter Berührungsempfindungen. (Dr Adolf Schwab.)

When simultaneous equal pressures are made at two points, say upon the volar surface of two fingers, the perception of the line connecting the two points gives rise to constant illusions. The errors vary in different individuals and with the point of stimulus.

Ueber Bewegungstäuschungen im Gebiete des Tastsinnes. (Emil V. Skramlik.)

A consideration of tactile false perceptions of movements. A great number of tactile illusions are physiologically analysed.

Ueber Tastwahrnehmungen. (Emil V. Skramlik.)

An investigation of tactile perceptions that occur when objects are brought in contact with the skin under a variety of conditions as to objects, part of skin touched, movements, displacement of the skin, effect of eyesight, etc. Illusions occur not only as to the shape of the objects but also as to our tactile apparatus in movement.

Revista de Psiquiatria.

Vol. v, No. 3. July 1924.

1. G. Stanley Hall. (H. F. Delgado.)

M. D. EDER.

An obituary notice of the former President of Clark University, with a bibliography.

2. Shame as a factor in inducing the adjustment of character to social standards. (Paul Wilson.)

A note contrasting self-satisfaction and shame.

3. Un Caso de filiriasis con psicosis maniaco depresiva. (H. F. Delgado, G. Almenara and E. Citiola.)

A Japanese woman, aged 26, separated from her (Japanese) husband, was found after admission to the aslyum to be infected with Filaria Bancrofti contracted in Japan, which she had left 21 years before her mental attack. Though it cannot be

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