bachtung sind neben den intellektuellen Fähigkeiten besonders Charaktereigenschaften, Willens- und Gefühlsleben, besondere Interessenrichtungen und Begabungen und das rasche Begreifen des Wesentlichen." Die Haupteigenschaften des Beobachters sind Totalität, Menschenkenntnis, Einfühlungsgabe, klare Beogachtung, Freundlichkeit, Güte und Geduld. H. BOGEN (Berlin) 393. BOBERTAG, O., Eine Versuchsschule als jugendkundliche Forschungsstätte. Psychol. Mitteilungen, 1921, 2, 73–79. · Die Ursache für die noch immer zu geringe Beachtung der exakten Jugendkunde liegt darin, dass ihre Ergebnisse zum grossen Teil anfechtbar sind. Dieser Umstand ist aus den ungünstigen Bedingungen unter denen die Forschung arbeiten musste, zu erklären. Durch eigens auf jugenkindliche Forschung mit eingestellte Versuchsschulen sind günstige Bedingungen zu schaffen. Arbeitprobleme stellen Schuleintritt, Begabungsdifferenzierung, geistiges Wachstum, charakterologische Beobachtungen, Berufswahl, freies kindliches Schaffen und anderes dar. Wesentlich ist in der Fülle der Probleme zweierlei: Gewinnung von Ergebnissen, die ein sicheres und klares Bild von der Entwicklung und dem Fortschritt der einzelnen Fähigkeiten im Lauf der Jahre geben, und die Bewährung der Ergebnisse durch den Vergleich mit den anderweitig gewonnenen Angaben über die Versuchspersonen. H. BOGEN (Berlin) 12. MENTAL EVOLUTION 394. MAILLARD, J., Acute Sense of Sound Location in Birds. Science, 1922, 55, 207-208. G. J. RICH (Pittsburgh) DR. C. S. MYERS has resigned from the directorship of the psychological laboratory of the University of Cambridge in order to devote his whole time to the work of the British National Institute of Industrial Psychology. Ar the meeting of the National Academy of Sciences, held in Washington on April 26, Professor C. E. Seashore of the State University of Iowa was elected a member. THE Publication of the Behavior Monographs will be discontinued upon the completion of the current volume (Volume 4) and a new series of Comparative Psychology Monographs will be initiated under the editorship of Professor W. S. Hunter, of the University of Kansas, with the coöperation of Professors H. A. Carr of the University of Chicago; S. J. Holmes of the University of California; K. S. Lashley of the University of Minnesota, and R. M. Yerkes of the National Research Council. The new monograph series will be broader in scope than the old and, in addition to studies in animal behavior, will publish work in human psychology conducted from the comparative point of view. DR. C. E. FERREE, of Bryn Mawr College, has been appointed one of an international commission of four for the standardization of the work on field taking, to report to the Thirteenth International Congress of Ophthalmology to be held in London in 1925. PROFESSOR E. B. TITCHENER, of Cornell University, delivered a lecture on "The Structure of the Physiological Psychology on April 8 before an open meeting of the William James Club of Wesleyan University. Ar the recent meeting of the Michigan Academy of Sciences, Dr. J. McKeen Cattell gave the evening lecture under the auspices of the University of Michigan, his subject being "The Uses of Psychology". THE Morison lectures before the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh were delivered by Professor G. Elliot Smith on May 1, 3 and 5, the subject being "The Evolution of the Human Intellect". THE PSYCHOLOGICAL BULLETIN THE PSYCHOLOGY OF TASTE AND SMELL BY ELEANOR A. McC. GAMBLE Since the October of 1915 when Hans Henning published in the Zeits. f. Psychol. the first instalment of his work on smell (Der Geruch), the psychology of taste and odor has altered almost as much as the map of Europe has changed within the same period. Perhaps, also like conditions in Europe, it has not yet come to a stable equilibrium. To know Henning's work, one might almost say, is to know the psychology of these overlapping fields, for not only is he responsible for the revolution in doctrine, but he has also compiled the most encyclopedic bibliographies which were ever made on these subjects. The student who wishes to orient himself in the psychology, physiology, chemistry, or biology of taste and smell should first read Henning's monograph, Der Geruch (1), with its appendix on the taste qualities and its critical survey of earlier work. He should then read Henning's Physiologie und Psychologie des Geruchs (2) in the Ergebnisse der Physiologie for 1919, and finally his Physiologie und Psychologie des Geschmacks (3) in the same Ergebnisse for 1921, and should examine the enormous bibliographies to both papers. These bibliographies are supposed to cover the periods from 1902 and 1903, respectively, but, as a matter of fact, they include many earlier investigations. The student, however, who wishes to hunt up the Ergebnisse for 1902 and 1903 will find. summaries of work on smell and taste by Zwaardemaker, with bibliographies to date. A few investigations covered by these earlier bibliographies are omitted by Henning. The present writer, lacking Henning's enormous library facilities, has not been able to find any very recent publications of importance to add to the lists of Henning. It therefore seems best to devote the greater part of this report to summarizing the destructive and the constructive work of Henning for the benefit of readers whose interests lie mainly in other fields. The Qualities of Taste and Smell. In 1915 most of us were teaching our classes that the qualities of smell were an unmapped wilderness as compared with the orderliness of colors and tones. Whereas colors constitute a tridimensional manifold of definitely related terms, smells, we said, are a manifold of indefinitely related Tastes, we believed, were only four in number-apart from fusions. But in 1915 and 1916, Henning gave, or tried to give, us the smell prism and the taste tetrahedron to add to the color pyramid which we now beat into the head of the undergraduate as the canons of the syllogism were beaten into the head of his grandfather. Let us first consider the question of smell qualities. After the publication of Zwaardemaker's Physiologie des Geruchs in 1895, his classification of odors was incorporated, as more or less satisfactory, into most textbooks which dealt with smell in any detail. This classification aims to be a "natural" one, that is, to include in the same groups and subgroups odors which show a mutual resemblance to one another. (See p. 215 of the Physiologie.) It is true that the scheme is an adaptation of the classifications of Linnæus and also that for the assignment of smells to classes authority is sought chiefly in the literature of the perfume industry; but it is not true, as Henning alleges (misinterpreting a statement of Zwaardemaker on p. 238) that Zwaardemaker disregarded sensory resemblances. Henning's own classification, however, has a great superiority over Zwaardemaker's in the fact that it is based on the direct experimental examination and comparison of a large number of odors by trained observers. Of this evidence something more will presently be said. Whether or not it is adequate to establishing the complete validity of the smell prism, it effectually overturns Zwaardemaker's scheme, which attempts to arrange, not individual smells, to be sure, but groups and subgroups of odors in a one-dimensional fashion, with fruity odors at one end of the series and fecal odors at the other. Henning, by showing clearly that there are criss-cross transitions between smells of six different types, has demonstrated once for all that smells, like colors, constitute a tridimensional manifold. This, in the writer's opinion, is the most noteworthy of Henning's important contributions to the psychology of smell. His prism has become so well known that the writer hesitates to describe it again, yet a brief reminder to the reader is necessary to give definiteness to this summary. The prism is rooted (1) in the conclusion that smells belong to six main classes and (2) in the view that each of these classes merges more or less directly into every other class through a series of transitional smells. The six classes are the flowery, typified by violet; the fruity, typified by lemon; the spicy, typified by nutmeg; the resinous, typified fairly well by frankincense; the putrid, typified by sulphuretted hydrogen; and the burning, typified by tar. The two triangular faces of the prism are to be made equilateral, whereas the rectangular faces are to be squares. At the six corners of the figure stand, respectively, the most typical smells of the six classes. At the corners of one triangle should stand the typical flowery, fruity, and putrid smells; at those of the other, the typical spicy, resinous, and burning smells. It should be noted that the typical flowery smell is connected with the resinous and the burning, the fruity smell with the spicy and the burning, and the putrid smell with the spicy and the resinous, not by edges of the prism but only by diagonal lines across the square faces. This means that one cannot pass from one member of the pair-say, flowery and resinous-to the other without cutting the series of smells connecting another pair-say, fruity and spicy. At the junction of the diagonals we must, therefore, have smells equally like those at the four corners of the square. These smells Henning believes he has found. The smell of arbor vitae, for example, occupies a central position between the flowery, fruity, spicy and resinous types of odor. Examples of the transitional smells which should stand on the edges of the prism are as follows: Geranium, between flowery and fruity; decaying fruit, between fruity and putrid; the fragrant gums, between spicy and resinous;* vanilla and thyme, between flowery and fruity; the piney smells, between fruity and resinous (camphor, so closely akin to the pines, standing very near the resinous corner); and, finally, the ammoniacal animal odors, between putrid and burning. Odors like garlic are made. transitional between spicy and putrid, the mints between fruity and spicy, and the smell of fish-scales between putrid and resinous. Before discussing the smell prism farther, let us turn to its mate, the taste tetrahedron. Since the earlier work done by von Kiesow By an unfortunate slip of the pen, the writer in reviewing Der Geruch for the Amer. J. (4) reported Henning as placing the fragrant gums, which are obviously somewhat spicy, between resinous and flowery. As a matter of fact, Henning could find no smell transitional between flowery and resinous which did not have either a distinctly fruity or spicy aspect. See p. 298 f. |