can share, and then the movement of the species into the environment where these secondary characters are necessary and hence primary. [P. 32.] In other words, the surplus created by an individual gives opportunity for educating children to a larger sphere of usefulness, which they make good by migration to appropriate environments. Character arises from the increased energies, and with this a demand for greater opportunity. Struggle then ensues with those already adjusted in the new environment, from which results the elimination of the unfit. Elimination, therefore, tends to keep the race to its greatest efficiency. Emotion, the author believes, here plays a large part in changing the characters of the survivors, and this because emotions have no structure or mechanism of their own by which they are expressed. They use structure created for other ends. Emotions are thus primarily destructive, create waste products, and force organisms back to a more primitive state with fewer structural adjustments to the environment. [P. 48.] With his chapter on Emotion, the author leaves his wonted territory and plunges into an unknown wilderness of biology. Here he finds a principle which he believes helps him to explain how emotions reduce the organism to a simple state. This principle is the reduction of chromatin in the nucleus during the maturation of the germ cells, a process which, as is well known, results in the halving of certain characteristic structures of the cell. After making numerous statements which are not true concerning reduction, as for example, “A polar body would then be the centrosome [sic] of an earlier division retained by the tension of the envelope" (p. 50), or "Reduction always precedes regeneration. . . . If the changes in the cells which create the new part could be observed, reductions would be found similar to those that take place when polar bodies are expelled" (p. 52), etc., he finally concludes that emotions are also due to reductions of like nature. "The first effect of an emotion, then, would be a reduction ending in the expulsion of polar bodies [sic] and the reduction of the cells to a simple condition." We wonder why reduc ion in male sex-cells was not also introduced; possibly because here there is no elimination of any part, all material becoming functional in germinal products; reduction, however, is precisely the same as in egg cells. It is a simple matter for the author to pass from this conclusion to another, equally impossible and delightfully illogical, that the brain and nerve centres are composed of germ cells. "The responsiveness of this cell (i.e., germ cell) is greater than that of any of the somatic cells derived from it" (prcbably because of its great generalization, although the statement is not strictly true). "It must therefore be thought of as the seat or necessary accompaniment of consciousness" (p. 76). Equally logical is it to say that the germ cells are the seat of digestion, of respiration, or of motion, etc. At this point another biological bogey appears. The centrosomes of a dividing cell two centres of kinetic activity, through whose agency, in part, the cell divides are used to explain the constancy of consciousness, which, he believes, is due to katabolic processes of the cell. Katabolism, however, alternates with anabolism, he argues, and therefore consciousness would be intermittent were there no remedy. This is provided by the two centrosomes. Two active centres tend to disrupt the cell, and for this evil the only remedy is the strengthening of the cell wall to resist the disrupting tendencies. The presence of two active centres while the cell divides tends to confirm the foregoing analysis of consciousness. [P. 76.] Another conclusion which follows in the chapter on Sensation is that the brain is an ovary. The egg, growing rapidly, forms a fold, and, since the ovary is formed first as a fold, the fold which develops into the brain must also be an ovary, from which it follows that, the nerves "being sex-products, they strive to break through the envelope and free themselves. . . . Where growth is active, the envelope yields before the growing nerve, until an equilibrium is obtained, with the result that a new organ is formed " (p 83). A tooth, for example, has such an origin: "The nerve, in its effort to emit its sex-products, presses against the skin and finally breaks through. The skin hardens. over the injured part and a tooth results " (p. 83). Comment on statements like these is unnecessary. Detailed consideration of the remainder of the work is hardly warranted. Statement after statement is made which is inaccurate biologically, or incorrectly applied, and the conclusions which follow on Devolution, Inner Organs of Expression (the "vehicle," by the way, of "acquired characters"), Education and Reform, based as they are upon false biological reasoning, and confused by the mixing of terms with principles, are weak and unconvincing. GARY N. CALKINS. La Crise Allemande de 1900-1902. Le Charbon, le Fer, et l'Acier. BY ANDRÉ E. SAYOUS, Paris, Larose, 1902. M. SAYOUS, already well known through his intelligent study of German Exchanges, and other contributions to the political economy of the day, has furnished us in La Crise Allemande a valuable collection of facts bearing on the operation and usefulness of German cartels, comptoirs, and other associations, whether of producers or of consumers, entered into with a view to eliminating some of the inconveniences that attend the free play of supply and demand. It is an interesting commentary on the views that prevailed at the beginning of last century; for the doctrine then propounded by the apostles of laissez-faire, that supply and demand furnished an admirable, natural, and even Providential method for adjusting prices and production, does not in the pages of M. Sayous's last book receive the honor even of a passing mention. The necessity of putting an end to the crises produced by this Providential plan has become so obvious that the question no longer is whether these crises can be eliminated, but only how the methods adopted to eliminate them can be improved or perfected. The study of the crises of 1900-1902 becomes therefore a study of the German cartel, and as such presents to Americans a useful analysis of ancient history for the imperfect combination known as the cartel is already ancient history to us and as such helps to confirm our convictions regarding the inevitableness of the more perfect concentration of industries with which we are already familiar in our own country. It is, of course, too much to expect of any form of industrial combination that it can eliminate crises altogether; but it is interesting to read the story of the part played by the German cartels during the last few years, if only to convince ourselves that partial combinations are perhaps likely to aggravate crises rather than to diminish them, and that nothing less than such a combination of producers, manufacturers and carriers as our Steel Trust presents can efficiently adjust production and regulate prices. It is clear, for example, that the Comptoir of Essen from 1900 to 1902 maintained the prices of coal in a manner ruinous to the steel industry; that at a time when the steel industry was clamoring for cheap coal, the comptoir stopped the sinking of new shafts (p. 153), and even exported coal at a lower price than that charged to the home industry (p. 154). That an article so vital to human needs as coal could be monopolized as it was by the Comptoir of Essen, is a fact that we have to confront in America as well as in Germany; and strange to say, the remedy of state ownership proposed by the Democratic party of the State of New York would seem to be of little avail in view of the fact that the state coal mines proved as greedy and regardless of public interests as the coal barons of Essen (p. 169). To this, however, it may be answered that coal mines worked in the interests of the Hohenzollerns can hardly be cited as against coal mines worked in the interests of an enlightened democracy; but then we have to bear in mind that the world has probably not yet seen a democracy sufficiently enlightened to watch and control the working of its departments so as to place them beyond the danger of official perfunctoriness on the one hand or the reach of individual greed on the other. However this may be, it is probable that the suggestions approved by the author as to the steps necessary to diminish the evils that arise from industrial combination are still inadequate. Publicity may prevent the exploitation of the investing public; it will hardly do much for the consumer; and the effort to check exportation below home prices by the establishment of counter premiums is difficult of practical realization. M. Sayous' work adds another proof of the glaring fact that the European industrial system exposes Europe either to the periodic bankruptcy that attends the free play of supply and demand, or to the tyranny that attends industrial concentration. In our country the latter kept in check by an ever possible though latent potential competition — has, up to the present time, kept us under the sway of what Mr. Ghent happily describes as a sort of "benevolent feudalism"; but some pertinently and disquietingly ask: How long will it remain benevolent? M. Sayous's book will be read by Americans with something of the complacent satisfaction with which a convalescent reads of the symptoms and disorders that attend the disease from which he is himself recovering. Those political economists, however, who persist in maintaining that there is no such thing as general over-production, if they want to preserve their complacence, would better leave this interesting book severely alone; for if the over-production of 1900 to 1902 in Germany was not general in the fullest sense of the word, it was sufficiently so to justify the indictment against unlimited competition to which over-production gives rise. American experience would seem to emphasize the fact that the German cartel is not centralized enough to produce the full advantages of combination, and yet is powerful enough to accentuate economic crises a condition of things out of which the completer combinations of our own country are likely to emerge and survive. PARIS, FRANCE. EDMOND KELLY. A History of Factory Legislation. By B. L. HARRISON, with a preface by Sidney Webb. & Son, 1903. xviii, 372 PP. HUTCHINS and A. THE history of British factory legislation, with its extraordinary interest, has been treated in not a few books and in very numerous articles. Yet, as Mr. Sidney Webb remarks in his preface, the work of Miss Hutchins and Miss Harrison for the first time presents that history in complete and systematic form. The book covers a somewhat narrower field than that, for instance, of W. Cooke Taylor, but it covers that field more thoroughly. The writers largely omit those harrowing details regarding evil factory conditions on which Taylor and others have dwelt. They take these facts for granted, and confine themselves chiefly to a careful analysis of the various acts, to a summary of the procedure, in and out of Parliament, by which the passage of the bills was secured, and of the arguments concerning them, and to brief but illuminating comment on the new principles from time to time admitted into legislation. In the main our authors have presented their material in purely historical form, with little expression of personal opinion. Their strong disposition in favor of government regulation however, crops out here and there, and is vigorously expressed in the concluding chapter. Indeed, the whole book may almost be considered a subtle but strong polemic in favor of still further legislation of greater uniformity, and of more adequate methods of enforcement especially as regards labor in small shops and in homes. Despite the pre-eminence which is very generally accorded to England in the protection of labor, the present writers feel that "an extraordinary timidity" has beset the entire movement. "We have never yet," they say, "made up our minds what we really mean by industrial legislation, or what we want from it." The record of a hundred years seems fairly to bear out the latter opinion, though scarcely the former. The survey here presented shows clearly that the factory legislation of to-day has been attained by many slow and halting steps, with occasional retrogressions. No systematic view of the entire industrial field, with all its needs, appears ever to have entered the mind of any British legislator, still less a simple and consistent philosophy of state interference. Regulation was long confined to the textile trades, in spite of abundant evidence of great evils elsewhere; its extension to other industries took place only gradually and unsystematically, as public attention was drawn from time to time. to particular abuses. From the beginning illogical distinctions between |