7o6 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
normal school and college students would fail to understand many parts of the book because it practically assumes that the reader has a knowledge of modern philosophy, e. g., "As Kant endeavored to clear away all the one-sided dogmatic views of preceding meta- physics by the standard of his analytic epistemology and to estab- lish in their place a new system of philosophy upon the unshakable basis of the a priori categories of knowledge, so Herbart tried the same in the field of pedagogy" (p. 200). (2) Even if students should understand what is said, they would not learn much history of education. Pestalozzi would be for them primarily a theorist, and of Pestalozzian industrialism as worked out by Fellenberg and Pes- talozzian object teaching, and of Pestalozzian methods of teaching the formal subjects by reducing them to their elements, they would learn practically nothing. (3) In presenting contemporary Ameri- can educational theory, Dewey's social conception surely deserves as much prominence as the theories of W. T. Harris and G. Stanley Hall, but it is not mentioned. (4) The author gives evidence of a wide knowledge of educational literature, including such German works as those of Heinrich Sherer in which the social background and practical influence of educational theory are emphasized. It is unfortunate that the author has not included more of this element and less of the philosophical.
S. C. Parker
Les merges mires et les naissances miraculeuses. By P. Saint- YVES. Paris: Emile Nourry, 1908. i6mo., pp. 280.
Saintyves' book is a volume in the Biblioth^que de critique re- ligieuse. It is called an essay in comparative mythology. It aims to bring the birth of Christ into relation and place with the vast number of miraculous births recorded in sacred books or recounted in the folklores and mythologies of many peoples. The field is not unworked. E. Sidney Hautant in his Legend of Persons presents many miraculous births; so does De Charencey in his Le fils de la vierge (published in second edition under the title Lucina sine con- cubitu). Saintyves has added to the work of his predecessors chiefly a method of treatment. He classifies and groups his great number of cases under the means by which conception has been produced. Thus his chapters are: "Fecundating Stones and
