380 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
pitiful dallying with incoherent details, until we learn how to construe these fragments in their functional relations.
As we have tried to make evident throughout this chapter, the terms in our schedule are merely tentative formulations of social facts which it is the task of sociology to make more exact. These incidents are merely data which certain types of sociolo- gists recognize the need of testing. Having these syntheses of many observations, we are in a position analogous with that of the physicists when they had gone far enough to describe "matter" as "that which has extension, density, specific gravity, cohesion, adhesion, inertia, momentum, etc." The science of physics was not completed in such formulas. It was virtually just proposed. The generalizations which we have brought together are not scheduled as a closed system of social science. They are statements of apparent and approximate truths in the region of which earnest efforts to develop tenable sociology are
in progress.
ALBION W. SMALL. THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO.
[To be continued.]
