6l2 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
represent groups of natives, dwellings, and brilliant trophies of artistic objects. This volume contains Book I, Principles of Ethnography, and part of Book II, American- Pacific Group of Races. Book I is an excellent presentation of the task of ethnography and an illustration of its methods and materials. The treatment is comparative. After defining the field of the science, stating the situation and numbers of the human race, discussing what "natural races" are, and investigat- ing the nature and development of civilization, the author passes to more special topics for consideration. Language, religion, science and art, invention and discovery, agriculture and cattle-breeding, clothing and ornament, habitations, family and social customs, the state, are the topics of as many interesting chapters. The publication of this part of the work as a separate book for use as a text in school and college classes would be an excellent thing. Book II but partly appears in this volume. It describes in detail certain groups of races. The physical characters, the languages, the social organization, the life and customs, the government, the religion, of each are presented. Special attention is given to the industrial arts and art products, and most of the illustrations are of museum specimens. The author makes great use of similarities in ethnographic objects as evidence of relationship or intercourse between peoples. His book will be in this country a wholesome corrective to the overstrained theories of "inde- pendent development" now so rife among us. The translator has done his work faithfully, but somewhat heavily ; the author's style, terse and extremely condensed, presented exceptional difficulty.
FREDERICK STARR.
GUSTAVE LE BON : The Crowd: a Study of the Popular Mind. New York: Macmillan & Co., 1896. $1.50.
IN this work Le Bon makes a careful study of the character and scope of the activities of crowds and mobs. He bases all his proposi- tions about these phenomena on his general theory of the nature of social interpretation as set forth in his prior work, Lois psychologiques de revolution des peuples. This theory involves a very sharp distinc- tion between the social institutions and the social soul, the institutions being simply manifestations of the soul, and the latter alone a living or creative element. Lame du peuple must then be studied first and
