The New Reservation of Time

By WILLIAM JEWETT TUCKER. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. 1916.

The Nation for January 11, reviews Dr. Tucker's latest volume in an article entitled "Our Ex-Presidents of Universities," from which we quote the following extract, in the belief that it will prove of great interest to the readers of the MAGAZINE.

"Dr. Tucker's book set out to be an essay towards the solution of the problem: How to endure being a retired president. When he relinquished active charge of Dartmouth he fell to considering whether the effect of society's creation by retirement of a quite elderly leisure class would intensify or remove "the reproach of old age." He answered the question in the new and inspiring spirit of resistance to superannuation, which makes so many men above seventy the admired companions of men in the twenties. He swiftly concluded that so far as his own case was concerned membership in the leisure class was not a discharge from responsibility for time, but an admission to larger and freer opportunities to use it. His retirement permitted him at last to consider a college presidency as an avocation, and to follow what is perhaps the highest calling of a man of leisure —to think and write disinterestedly for the Republic and the cause of mankind.

"It is an interesting fact that Dr. Tucker's thinking and writing gain in vitality as he drops the theme of his main life work. He treats of undergraduate scholarship as if there were still much "to be said on the subject, but also, as if he were rather weary of saying it. He strikes into unacademic social and political questions with an observable zest, as if it were a genuine relief to turn his back upon the regulation of school-boys and the infinite palaver of faculties. He puts more vim into a footnote on the recently threatened railway strike, in his essay on "The Goal of Equality," than went into the entire chapter on the undergraduates: "The strike is a legitimate economic weapon: as a political threat it is utterly illegitimate. Carried over into politics, a strike becomes a revolution. Revolutionary methods have no justification except in the vindication of human rights. They have no place in the settlement of economic values. Should they be adopted by organized labor they would make organized labor a political outlaw." He enlivens his long hopeful essay on "The Progress of Social Consciousness" by a critical consideration of the Progressive Movement of 1912 and a very firm explanation of the differences between the character and leadership of Abraham Lincoln and the character and leadership of Theodore Roosevelt. In "The Ethical Challenge of the War," "The Crux of the Peace Problem," and "The Control of Modern Civilization," he interprets impressively the moral issues of the great conflict, tells us what is the matter with the peace movement, and discusses suggestively the way of international salvation for which the nations cry aloudthe way of self-sacrifice and self-control which few of the crying nations are as yet ready to take.

"Dr. Tucker is not the only retired university president who has in recent years been thinking and writing disinterestedly for the and the cause of mankind: but he is perhaps the first to recognize his work as the fruit of a new and possibly important elderly leisure class. The precious aspects of membership in this class are various. Its members need not speak nor write except when moved by an inner call: they may therefore be expected to purge their utterances of the humdrum official platitudes of the bad days of their presidencies. They are scholars as well as administrators: they may therefore be expected to rise above the violence of an uncritical partisanship. They are too old or too weary or too proud to enter into competition for such political honors as might be considered an augmentation of their sober academic glories; they may therefore be expected to speak weightily and to be heard gravely, as sage and unselfish counsellors of the national conscience. The class which we have been describing is really of quite distinguished morality and intelligence—it would be a hard class for a vulgar parvenij, to enter ; but it is a small class, and it ought to be enlarged by the accession of a few more men who have supped fairly full of honors—say the ex-Presidents of the United States."

The Influence of Joy: By GEORGE V. N. DEARBORN '9O. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1916. Pp. XVIII-223.

In this book, which was written as part of the Mind and Health Series edited by H. Addington Bruce, a significant contribution is made to the rapidly growing: literature of popular psychology. The author is both a psychologist and a physiologist, and combines with his soundly scientific knowledge a facility of popular style that instantly commends his book to the general reader.

The subject-matter of the volume is of wide interest, but it has heretofore been presented to the public in scientific accounts of too technical a character to. claim . the attention of any but the initiated. Extremely important researches, dealing. with the bodily effects of emotion, have been in progress for a number of years, as: for example those of Pavlov in Russia and of Cannon in this country; but their results have been introduced for the most part only to a small and select circle of readers. Professor Dearborn has rendered a very real service both to the general public and to the subject of psychology iby bringing together in very compact and readable form the more important practical conclusions that have resulted from scientific investigations of emotion.

The tonic effect of joy on the human organism is set forth in detail with especial reference to its influence on digestion, on the circulation, and on the general nervous system. The reader is especially recommended to the three chapters that deal with these topics, for it is in these hundred pages that the author makes his most effective statement of certain fundamental principles of the art of living.

Professor Alfred L. Smith '12 is the author of "The Birth of a New Profession" in the December number of The Nation's Business.

The American Historical Review for January contains an article, "The Earl of Carlisle and the Board of Trade 1779" by Professor A. H. Basye.

"Vermont Books for Vermont Libraries" by Assistant Librarian Harold G. Rugg. '06 appeared in the Bulletin of theVermont Free Public Library Commission for December.

Professor W. K. Wright is the author of "Psychology of the War" in the Psychological Bulletin for December 15, 1916.

Professor G. F. Hull in Science for January 12, reviews "Die Kultur der Gegenwart. Herausgegeben von Paul Hinneberg. Teil III., Abtlg. III. Physik 1915."