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NEW BOOKS. 117 'I'll,- I'liiixit-iil ,ihn;- <// tin- ( 'hit, I tnid ]foir to Study It. By S. H. ROWE. New York and London : The Macmillan Company, 1899. Pp. xiv., 207. Price, 1.00. This is essentially a practical book. The author describes simple tests, clinical, anthropometric and psychophysical, of the child's sight, hearing, other senses, motor ability, enunciation, nervousness, fatigue and habits of postxire and of movement, and discusses the cognate topics of disease, growth and adolescence, and school and home conditions that affect the child's physical nature. The work should be useful ; its occasional weak- ness in theory is more than offset by its generally sensible tone. Educational Aims and Educational Values. By P. H. HANUS. New York and London: The Macmillan Company, 1899. Pp. vii., 211. Price, $1.00. A series of eight essays, written with sound judgment but in a somewhat redundant style, upon contemporary educational problems. Chapters i.-v. attempt to formulate the aims of elementary and secondary education in America. " The aim of education is to prepare for complete living. . . . We have a common measure of educational value. Its factors are in- centives and power." The remaining chapters deal with the professional training of the college-bred teacher, and with the permanent influence of Comenius. La Dissolution. Par ANDRE LALANDE. Paris : Felix Alcan, 1899. Pp. 492. Price, 7 fr. 50. This volume is an attempt to show that the trend of progress is in the direction of homogeneity, as against Mr. Spencer's hypothesis of hetero- geneity. The proof is mainly positive, and rests on a comprehensive array of facts drawn from every sphere of life and thought : the a priori aspect of the problem is not emphasised, it being felt and we may admit rightly felt that the burden of proof on this side lies rather with the adversary. M. Lalande's argument is too diffuse to be summarised here : one can only indicate some of the positions which he takes up. Mr. Spencer's Law of Evolution he would prefer the term Involution he regards as no law, but only a bad definition, and the principle of the permanence of energy appears to him, as to so many others, only a variant of the law of causality. He believes, further, that the individual is an elementary and not a higher unity, and that accordingly the State is the antithesis of the organism ; as to the development of mind he hints, following Rousseau, that life has lost all that reflexion has gained. In what Wundt calls the normative character of all rational action consists its advance towards homogeneity, in the ideals, namely, of truth, beauty, and goodness, which constitute the ground of objectivity in science, art, and morality. M. Lalande goes on to deplore the crude methods of anthropologists, who deduce arguments as to the infancy of the race from customs of effete and senile savagery, and imparts local colour to his work by predicting the dissolution of the family, and the ultimate triumph of the principles of the French Revolution. In con- clusion, he ridicules recent attempts to get beyond an anthropocentrie teleology, and insists that in the order of nature death follows rather than precedes life, and that this being so death is an incontrovertible witness of dissolution. The error of this book is in its presentation of results. The evidence