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Jersey, a half sister became a practising “homeopathic” physician, and, in 1863 three Fowlers founded the New York Medical College for Women. In the 1870’s, to the chagrin of the more delicate members of Victorian society, Orson Fowler became a firm supporter of sex education and gave advice openly, clearly in advance of his time, on all the subtleties of connubial bliss.

The publishing house managed to survive the vicissitudes of the 19th century and was able to continue precariously until early in the 20th. The phrenological journal which had begun publication in 1838, after having been altered in format and title throughout the many years of its existence, published its last issue in January, 1911. The Phrenological Institute which had been founded to train phre- nologists continued to graduate students “until at least the 1920’s.” Jessie Allen Fowler, Lorenzo Fowler’s daughter, was able to keep the Fowler form of phrenology alive until 1932, a full one hundred years after Spurzheim’s visit. In that year with her death the dynasty came to an end.

Although “practical phrenology” was anathema to many 19th century scientists, it “seemed” to work and the average man was able to comprehend it. Stern has given us in this beautifully written volume an excellent picture of the scope and breadth of influence that the phrenological movement had in her account of its most well-known adherents. Any psychological bibliophile or bibliophage who has inter- ests in 19th century Americana, will get a vivid picture through this volume of an era during which a doctrine, later to be discarded as pseudoscientific, based on a “psychology” of the “mind,” permeated the thoughts and the lives of perhaps three generations. While psychology as a “science” was struggling into existence, the average man, as yet unaware of that struggle, sought and obtained seemingly work- able advice and insight into his nature through those simplistic, although erroneous, phrenological tenets. This, Madeleine Stern’s most recent opus, adds admirably to the growing literature on the history of this movement. It provides for the historian an account of the happenings “back home,” so to speak, when the early behavioral scientists, perhaps unaware of those happenings, were slowly developing interests outside the traditional interests of the scientific community.

Ms. Stern, who has written many scholarly articles and books on 19th century American publishing history, literature, Americana, and biography (e.g., The Life of Margaret F,uller [New York, 19421; & Purple Passage: The Li fe of Mrs. Frank Leslie [Norman, 19531) was most certainly equal to the task she undertook in writing Heads and Headlines. In this volume of 348 pages, 63 pages are devoted to detailed documentation which provides for the reader a more than adequate indication of the scholarship involved in piecing together a biographical-historical account of an important period (c. 1832-1932) in the history of the behavioral sciences.

ANTHONY A. WALSH University of New Hampshire

GIORGIO TAGLIACOZZO, Editor, HAYDEN V. WHITE, Co-Editor. Giambattista Vico. An International Symposium. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1969, Pp. xxvi + 636. $12.00. An intriguing and multisided thinker, Giambattista Vico offers a classic proof

of the validity of interdisciplinary studies. Born in Naples more than three hundred years ago, this eighteenth-century philosopher had more or less original views on a

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wide range of scholarship: from history and philosophy to llnguistics and anthro- pology, not to mention his basic contributions to the history of law, aesthetics and sociology. He can, therefore, be studied with profit by specialists in different fields. In consideration of this fact, Giorgio Tagliacozzo, who has undertaken the difficult task of celebrating the tcrcentenary year of the Italian philosopher’s birth, was perfectly right in calling upon a host of distinguished scholars from Europe and America to contribute to this symposium. Thc multiplicity of Vico’s discoveries has finally attracted the interest of many modern scholars who are illustrious testimony to what Professor Tagliacozzo calls “the present-day return to Vico” (p. vii).

The most fascinating aspect of Vichian research is the unfathomed depth of its possibilities. Unlike the works of other thinkers, which have been fully exploited by their followers and exhaustively studied by historians of Western thought, Vico’s writings are as yet relatively untilled ground. This remains the case despite the enthusiastic admiration paid to him by some major figures of European culture, such as Michelet and Croce. In point of fact, Vico’s thought has invariably been mis- understood by his detractors, as well as by his eulogists, or, to put it in Professor Tagliacozzo’s words, “his thought as a whole has been neither understood com- pletely nor utilized fully” (p. vii). It is only in our own time that the real shape of Vico’s thought is unfolding before our eyes as the mythical mists that surrounded the personality of the great interpreter and explorer of myths are gradually vanish- ing.

The present book is divided into four sections, corresponding to the four differ- ent kinds of contributions it contains. The first section is dedicated to “Comparative Historical Studies,” and includes eleven papers, among which is Pietro Piovani’s “Vico without Hegel.” Professor Piovani’s contribution is a sort of manifesto of the new Vichian activity in Italy, concentrating on the philosopher’s writings, without linking them, in a more or less arbitrary way, to Hegelian or Crocean thought. This approach to Vico, now prevailing in Italy, is embodied in the series “Studi Vichiani,” edited by Professor Piovani.

The second section, dedicated to “Vico’s Irifluerice on Western Thought and Letters,” consists of seven papers concerning the fortune of Vico in Italy, France, Spain, Russia and Great Britain. The attitude of the British world towards the author of the New Science is the subject of th rw of the above-mentioned contribu- tions: R6n6 Wcllek’s “The Supposed Influence of Vico on England and Scotland in the Eighteenth Century,” George Whalley’s “Coleridge and Vico,” and A. Walton Litz’s “Vico and Joyce.” Professor Wellek’s essay seems to me particularly inter- esting, because it deals with a highly controversial, and yet very fascinating prob- lem, namely, Vico’s grcat merit of developing in an original way some elements of British culture (for instance, the Lockean conception of human understanding).

The third section, “Vico and Contemporary Social and Humanistic Thinking”, contains seven articles dedicated to those aspects of Vico’s thought connected with anthropology, linguistics, sociology, legal thought, and economics. Among these offerings are Tullio De h4auro’s “Giambattista Vico : From Rhetoric to Linguistic Historicism” and Edmund Leach’s “Vico and Lcvi-Strauss on the Origins of Human- ity,” not to mention Professor Tsgliacozzo’s paper on economic Vichianism. But it is the fourth section, “Vico and Modern Philosophy, Pedagogy, and Aesthetics,” that is the richest and most articulate, inasmuch as it includes sixteen contributions

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written by some leading authorities in the history of philosophy. This part of the book, opened by a stimulating article by Isaiah Berlin (“A Note on Vico’s Concept of Knowledge”) is an updated assessment of the philosopher’s relevance in the con- text of Western culture. Particularly noteworthy are Nicola Badaloni’s “Ideality and Factuality in Vico’s Thought,’’ Antonio Corsano’s “Vico and Mathematics,” James M. Edie’s “Vico and Existential Philosophy,” and Enzo Paci’s “Vico, Structuralism, and the Phenomenological Encyclopedia of the Sciences.”

As no chapter on Vico and psychology is included in the volume, brief mention should be made of the psychological insights held by Vico and scattered throughout the various parts of the volume. He established the basic differentiation between natural sciences, i.e. “mathematics” produced by men (“certum”) and human sciences involved in the development of mankind (“verum”) : the first responding to scientific methodology, the latter to empathic understanding of con-science. Moreover, he posited that the best way to study human sciences is through knowl- edge of the characteristics of functioning of the human mind from birth on; hence, the importance attributed by him to poetry, history, language, fantasies, myths and law.

Human development takes place for Vico in a holistic way through stages lead- ing from early indifferentiation to hierarchic differentiation. The notions of ego- centrism, realism (inability to separate subject from object), animism and others, are anticipated by him. Likewise, from the perspective of today’s dynamic psy- chology, he considered concupiscence, aggressivity and narcissism as fundamental instinctual forces and foresaw the importance of projection, repression of instincts and sublimation. Concretely, he explained the logic of primitive societies through a careful study of myths and poetry.

The image of Vico that emerges from this symposium is controversial and in many cases may even be said to be contradictory, because it reflects the different points of view of so many diverse scholars. Yet the excellent essays collected here ultimately make up a well-balanced book, for they appear to converge harmoniously in pointing out the “historical-genetic-semantic conception of the unity of knowl- edge” (p. 605) which Professor Tagliacozzo considers the main feature of the Vichian philosophy. This confers upon the book an inner unity of purpose making it all the .more effective. I n spite of any possible reservations about the individual contribu- tions, this symposium, as a whole, doubtlessly represents an important chapter in the history of twentieth century Vichian studies.

University of California, Berkeley

RICHARD M. DORSON, The British Folklorists, a History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968, Pp. x + 518. In this stimulating book, Richard Dorson, Professor of History and Folklore

and Director of the Folklore Institute a t Indiana University, has recorded the slow, fitful advance of folklore studies in the British Isles. Beginning as a pastime of eighteenth-century gentlemen, this field became the profession of an elite group of Victorians who claimed that theirs was a science as distinct and consequential as anthropology. Dorson’s wide reading and infectious enthusiasm enhance this sur- vey of British folklore and folklorists up to the first world war.

GUSTAVO COSTA