Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/286

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274
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

men of learning as could be found. The emperor was fond of music, and promoted the reform of church singing, introducing the Gregorian Chants, and it is said, also the organ. But his reform in education, and that of Alfred in England a half-century later, were temporary in their effects. During the three centuries after the death of Charlemagne, learning languished in Europe, but among the Arabs at this period it was flourishing. About 1100 there arose studia generalia, or what we should now designate as professional schools, called forth, as Professor Laurie believes, by the growth of learning demanding specialization, by the rise of a lay feeling in connection with the work of the physician, the lawyer, and even the theologian, and by the actual specializing of the three leading studies at different centers of instruction. These schools were open to all the world, free from monastic rule, and self-governing. The name university came later. In 1224, Frederick II combined the three faculties with a school of arts at Naples, and incorporated the University of Naples, with definite authority and privileges. The University of Bologna first became noted as a school of civil law; later instruction in canon law, arts, medicine, and theology, came to be given. The University of Paris had a similar gradual development. The term universitas had at first no reference to the scope of the curriculum, but meant simply a community. In form of government, the literary communities copied the free trade-guilds. The rights to practice and to teach medicine were the first degrees. The degree of Baccalaureus Artium originally marked the end of what was regarded as a preparatory course, fitting the student to commence his study in arts for the master's or teacher's degree. Professor Laurie sets the time of the beginning of university life at Oxford, at about 1140, and at Cambridge about 1200, and he thinks their university organization arose about 1230, after the large migration of students came to them from Paris. The University of Prague, founded in 1348, by Charles IV, was the starting-point of the great German system of universities. It followed the plan of Paris, where Charles had been a student. In his closing chapter Professor Laurie gives an interesting account of the university studies and the conditions of graduation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, from which the reader may learn how many current academic forms are survivals of mediæval practices.

Elements of Physiological Psychology. By George T. Ladd, Professor of Philosophy in Yale University. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1887. Pp. 696. Price, $4.50.

We consider this the best book that has ever been published in America upon that particular branch of psychology of which it principally treats. It deals chiefly with the nervous mechanism and correlations with the mind, embracing under the latter head questions of the localization of cerebral functions, the quality of sensations, their quantity, the various presentations of sense, the time-relations of mental phenomena, feelings and motions, the physical basis of the higher faculties, and certain statical relations of the body and mental phenomena. Thus far and within these limits the book is excellent. The latest results of the study of mind from the physical point of view are thoroughly exhibited. The fruits of German study are especially well presented, and the recent work done by the Johns Hopkins University scholars in establishing the existence of the temperature sense, we are glad to see, meets, with the author's recognition. Without taking the space to particularize merits, and without searching for particular and minor defects, we are justified, upon the whole, in commending highly this work as far as the close of Part Second.

The third part, entitled "The Nature of Mind," ought to have been entirely omitted. It is not only superfluous, but painfully unsatisfactory. No sufficient foundation is laid for what is said, and the treatment itself is extremely inadequate. Until the other branches of psychology beyond the physiological are considered, even hypotheses or surmises respecting the ultimate nature of mind are out of place. The author in his introduction attempts to justify the metaphysical discussions and theses with which the work closes on the ground that psychology inevitably leads up to philosophical questions, and must furnish the basis upon which they are to be answered. Undoubtedly so; but that does not warrant a writer who makes