316 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
general and a part of the special appropriateness of which I acknowledge, with the suggestion that searchings of heart might induce confessions in other quarters. "We sociologists," says Dr. Steinraetz, " talk too much about the character of our researches, about what we are going to do and even of what we are not going to do, of the limits of our discipline, but we forget to make our science, and a science is made only by discoveries of truths, small or great. We have no need what- ever of grand, premature schemes, general hypotheses, original discov- eries without a shadow of proof. Our young science is prolific of them. The man of science has no business to build these grand but fragile structures, he has no business to astonish the rabble with his bold ideas, it is his duty to discover some small portion of solid truth, to push his inquiries as far as possible, never forgetting that in science the most humble truth well established is worth a hundred times more than the most striking fantasy."
ALBION W. SMALL.
The Child and Childhood in Folk- Thought. By ALEXANDER FRANCIS CHAMBERLAIN. Macmillan & Co., 1896. 8vo, 464pp. $3.
THIS interesting volume is a compilation of usages, ceremonies, superstitions, and proverbs concerning children. Ethnology, folk-lore and modern pedagogy, and, it may be added, polite literature, contrib- ute the data used by Mr. Chamberlain, who states that his object is "to treat of the child from a point of view hitherto entirely neglected, to exhibit what the world owes to childhood and the motherhood and the fatherhood which it occasions, to indicate the position of the child in the march of civilization among the various races of men, and to esti- mate the influence which the child-idea and its accompaniments have had upon sociology, mythology, religion, language." As a matter of fact, however, Mr. Chamberlain does not devote the bulk of his book to an estimate of the influence of the presence of the child upon the course of social development, immediately upon the family and medi- ately upon society, but oddly enough magnifies the fact that children " have figured in the world's history and its folk-lore as magi and med- icine-men, as priests and oracle-keepers, as physicians and healers, as teachers and judges, as saints, heroes, discoverers, and inventors, as musicians and poets, actors and laborers in many fields," .... assum- ing, apparently, that qua priest, et cetera, the child has contributed to the
