Good Eyes for Life

Heredity and EnvironmentBy Gladys C. Schwesinger. New York: Macmillan, 1933. 484 pp. Price, $4.00. Heredity and Environment will either be considered an elementary revamping of three or four standard works, or a profound study " in the genesis of psychological characteristics," depending upon whether one is or is not familiar with the literature of psychological testing and personality measurement. Not that it is not a very useful book to one in either category-on the contrary, even the student of the field will find it a convenient summary of Pintner's Intelligence Testing, Symonds's Diagnosing Personality and Character, Hollingworth's Vocational Psychology and Character Analysis, and the Twenty-seventh Year Book of the National Society for the Study of Education, all brought up to date by the careful editing of last year's Psychological Abstracts. It is an excellent textbook for courses in psychological measurement, for it is, in the main, an elaborate survey of the I.Q., its measurement, and the factors that influence it; but it is hardly, except in one portion, an adequate treatment of heredity and environment. Why a study in genetics should devote almost two-thirds of its pages to listing measures of intelligence and personality and to summarizing superficially the viewpoints of the major schools of thought on what constitutes personality, and only about one-third (one of six chapters) to the subject of the book as indicated in the title, is difficult to see. It really consists of three distinct uncoordinated parts, and if each of these sections were published separately, only praise for the author would be in order, for two of them would be compact summaries of (1) the field of intelligence and personality measurement, and (2) the variety of viewpoints on intelligence, while the third would be a monograph on recent studies of the effects of various environmental factors on the I.Q. On the whole, the book is a very scholarly work, but it is unfortunate. that three distinct unrelated studies were bound between two covers ostensibly as one study. Each portion serves a useful purpose, but only one serves the purpose of the book. Evidence of painstaking work abounds throughout, and specific references are so numerous that reading is sometimes made difficult; more than 800 references are included in bibliographies listed after each major chapter. MORRIS KRUGMAN