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BOOK REVIEWS

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patterns have long been recognized m music; major tonality depicts joy,
while minor tonality expresses sadness.
A further analysis is made of rhythmical patterns of which four main
kinds are found, pendular motion, circular motion, downward motion,
and persistency. These figures represent such acts as the rustling of
trees, spinning or cradle songs, dying, and quiescence.
The book is written from the musicians' viewpoint and the validity of
the conclusions depend upon the author's selection of examples, but since
the sampling is so large240 musical selectionsno great sampling
error is likely. The author has made a good analysis and the conclusions
now need to be checked by the experimental method using a large group
of musical subjects.
RALEIGH M. DRAKE,

Wesleyati College, Macon, Ga.


CAMPBELL, C. MACTIE. Human Personality and the Environment. New
York: Macmillan 1934. Pp. 252.
The author, in his preface to this little volume containing the substance
of six lectures delivered before a lay audience in Boston, has himself
reviewed the book fairly and impartially. A series of lectures to laymen
could hardly have been more technical, and while the professional psychologist would have wished for a more precise formulation of principles
and supporting evidence, "the impatient desire for a unitary formulation
may lead him to lay undue emphasis on one or other rigid formulation
. . . to the exclusion of other aspects of the total facts of being "
The lectures deal successively with food, oxygen and other basic supplies as they affect temperament; the glands, the autonomic system and
the optic thalamus, structures intimately related to emotional life; genetics, and other basic physical factors. From genes and chromosomes
Campbell shifts almost unnoticed into a discussion of childhood conditioning; from this point the book summarizes in a very readable and yet
accurate way our knowledge and theoretical interpretation of the social
development of personality.
The lecture style contributes enjoyable bits of humor such as the fun
poked at over-enthusiastic analysts by Sir William Osier. Osier is quoted
to this effect: "The Pediatrics Society discourages bottle feeding of
babies because . . . it is clearly shown that intellectual obliquity, moral
perversion and special crankiness of all kinds result directly from the
. . . gross and unworthy deception to which (the child) is subjected . . . "
We could wish that a similar verbal spanking had been administered to
the endoerinologists, some of whose extremest fulmmations on the subject of personality are quoted without posting signs reading "Danger! "

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BOOK REVIEWS

The lecture style may also have contributed to an occasional use of


dubious terminology; for instance, the term "instinctive" is occasionally
applied incautiously to activities which are plainly learned.
The last two lectures, " T h e personality and some of its tasks" and
" T h e personality and the total situation" are excellent treatments of
the psychiatric approach to the substitutive mechanisms of personality
and its manipulation of Teality in quest of self-expression.
The reviewer recommends it to laymen with some knowledge of biology,
and to students desiring a first introduction to the complex fields grouped
as "personality." He would also suggest a use which Dr. Campbell
may consider a perversion, viz., as required reading at the end of an
elementary psychology course. So many teachers (and textbooks) plaster
on the student a patch relating to sensations, one about glands, another
on emotions, and leave the personality (and psychology) as a mere patchwork without integration, that a book of this sort has great possibilities.
The style is so lucid that the reading would put few strainB even on
the intellectual endowment of college sophomores.
Boss STABNEE,

People's Junior College, Chicago, Illinois.

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