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further statement about the automatic passage of information into action. If these exceptions should be sustained, however, it would remain true that the corrections would not have been possible if Professor Ward had not made the approximations. For ten years I have been instructing students of sociology that they must master this work in order to have the standing ground from which to con- sider present aspects of sociological problems. The second edition is not changed except by addition of a brief review of the develop- ment of interest in sociology since the original publication, and par- ticularly of the career of the first edition. Its appearance gives occasion, however, for repeating the opinion which I have so often expressed. It is a serious reflection upon the quality of thought which has been given to social questions in this country that so few men have discovered Ward's Dynamic Sociology, and still fewer have studied it. Men who are capable of following Ward's thought may deny that he has established his positions, but they can hardly refuse to admit that he has brought the psychic factors of civilization into definiteness, prominence, and correlation which had not been evident before he wrote. ALBION W. SMALL.
The Theory of Socialization. A syllabus of sociological principles for the use of college and university classes. By PROFES- SOR FRANKLIN H. GIDDINGS. The Macmillan Co., 1897. Pp. xii-f-47. 0.60.
PROFESSOR GIDDINGS has done well to offer this syllabus as a guide to the larger work, The Principles of Sociology. A third edition of the latter has already appeared, and a French translation by Vte. Combes de Lestrade has been issued as No. VII of the Bibliotheque Sociologique Internationale.
Professor Giddings is furnishing a rare illustration of what can be accomplished by first-class thought power in spite of a dangerous method. Sociology, in his conception, is primarily and chiefly con- cerned with those phases of social fact about which evidence is least accessible and least controllable, viz., social genesis. In default of data he is compelled to present as a system a series of dicta and deductions from premises that are utterly inadequate. The result is some splendid guesswork. As he hinisdf insists ( Preface to 3d ed., p. xvi) science cannot get on without guessing. I do not question the
