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NEW BOOKS. 275 feeling that the psychological foundation is a little too easily gained to be quite secure. Another example of a serious difficulty summarily dismissed is to be found in the footnote on page 203. Whatever may be said of his premises, M. Lacombe carries them logically to practical and useful conclusions. Ptyehologische Unfersuchungen ueber das Ltsen. Von I'.KNNH ERDMAMN und RAYMOND DODGE. Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1898. Pp. viii., 360. As its title implies, this book gives a resume of the works on reading that appeared prior to 1896, and records the results of additional experiments on new or disputed points. The volume begins with a summary of the preceding discussions, having particular reference to the controversy between the alienists as to whether reading is by letters or entire words. This serves to introduce the treatment of the problem as a whole. The first phase of the question that the authors consider on their own account, and the one to which they contribute most new material, is as to the part played by eye movements and pauses in reading. The funda- mental question in this connexion has regard to the number and conditions of the pauses that are made in reading a line. The conditions fall into two classes. The first, the merely physiological, are to be found in the size of the field of clear vision ; the second are furnished by supplementing in terms of context. The distance of each eye movement is about one half of the diameter of the field of clear vision, but varies with the part of the line, and with the degree of familiarity with language, subject matter, and text. It is less for proof-reading than for ordinary reading (reading for the meaning). In general, it can be said that the pauses in eye-movements are most frequent when context helps least. Chapters iii.-viii. are devoted to a discussion of the question of the nature of reading, whether by words or separate letters, and the problems that Wundt has treated under the head of 'the range of attention'. The authors constructed a new instrument, which is a combination of the revolving disk of Goldscheider and Miiller and the projection apparatus of Scripture. It consisted, essentially, of a camera with a revolving disk before the lens. The length of the exposure is controlled by adjusting a radial slit in the disk. They assert that it possesses the advantages of great accurracy and of binocular adaptation. Wundt ] has called attention, in his recent criticism, to the fact that the great accuracy for small time intervals is of little or no value, because of the long latent period of the retina, and that the Helmholtz and Cattell instruments both permit the use of the two eyes. The results obtained confirm that of Cattell, that four or five letters can be seen with a single exposure, and that four or five tunes as many letters can be read, if they are grouped in familiar words. In this field, too, two factors are to be distinguished. The one is, again, the physio- logical range of clear vision ; the other, the apperceptive factors. With discrete letters, not all that are within the limit of the field of clear vision can be read, i.r., come into consciousness ; while when the letters are grouped in words, more letters can be read than can be clearly seen. That is, letters that extended beyond the field were read, and words could be read that were so far away that the separate letters could not be Been. Moreover, in connected sentences less than a line in length, words could be read that fell entirely without the field of clear vision. In view of these facts and the errors that are made in reading indistinct l Phil. Stud., vol. rv., p. 287.