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This large work is published in two attractive volumes, which have consecutive pagination. Three chapters of the first volume present a general view of the principles of the science of genetics, and groups of characteristics and abnormalities are discussed in the remaining chapters. Chapters covering neurologic, psychiatric and psychologic conditions appear consecutively in the second volume.
The chapters on general principles, in volume I, may be used as a review of the principles of genetics if their rather great limitations are kept in mind. There is failure to take account of the possibility of transmission of characteristics through substances in the cytoplasm. The revolutionary work of H. J. Müller and others on the environmental influences on mutation rates is not mentioned. The presentation of the concept of penetrance is distorted. This concept will be familiar to few medical readers. The term is used to describe the fact that certain characteristics