Few people, comparatively, however intelligent and generally thoughtful, have as yet stopped to consider the surpassing interest and the unique importance of Our Senses. Living gateways as the sense organs are between ourselves and our ever-changing surroundings, both spiritual and material, they constitute the channels not only of our life-satisfaction, but of all our immediate knowledge as well. If, then, in discussing them, biological imagination and breadth and depth go hand in hand with technical knowledge of the highest grade, the volumes comprised should be both human and scientific. And these volumes are so, and will be. It is because of such possibilities that a series like the present, authentic yet interesting and inexpensive, must appeal to the intelligent man or woman of to-day. As contributions to psychology and to education their value is certain to be great, as indeed is indicated by the list of their authors, whom it would be superfluous to praise or even to portray.

Small in number are the topics in all the wondrous range of the science of living things that are more alluring for their very mystery and romance than these same gateways by which we may go out into “our world” and by which this same great world may come into us and, for the little span of life, lend us a feeling of home-dwelling.

Within the past decade there has been a general popular awakening from the former uninterested attitude toward these phenomena of the physical and mental processes by which we keep in touch with the things outside ourselves. A fair knowledge of the rudiments of biology, of physiology, and of psychology now has become part of the curriculum of our schools and colleges. And of these three sciences it is psychology which has entered so deeply into our everyday life—business life as well as personal—that at last no one can escape its influence. And no one wishes to, for psychology in a sense has become the intellectual handmaiden of all who think in terms of to-day, with to-day’s amazing development of insight into the mortal meanings of our very selves, body always as well as soul. Our scientific realization of our true continuity with all things else goes on apace, and our personal relations to the boundless, perhaps Infinite, Cosmos of consciousness, life, and energy seem ever clearer. Thus, in a way, the sense organs give us personal anchorage in a Sea which else sometimes, from its very immensity and stress, would overwhelm us. Our range, although the broadest as yet vouchsafed to life, is as it were but a mere line out into the complexity of the Actual. The first step to the appreciation of this complexity and its implications for the human mind is knowledge of the conditions of its acquirement,—of the sense organs and of the perplexing brain behind them.

Editorial duty or privilege fails to know much as yet of the detailed contents of these several volumes. But the editor does know not a little about the arrangers and expounders of the volumes’ contents, and he knows that they are women and men of conspicuous sense—trustworthy in every sense. The books are the best of their kind and are in a class by themselves. They are the standard authority for ordinary use. These volumes when disposed as a red-backed set on one’s library shelf will be a set of books to be proud of. And the high school boys and girls and their fathers evenings and on Sundays and their mothers at the club all alike will think of them as highly valued friends, both wise and agreeable, as pleasant to meet for an hour as the most welcome visitor well could be. No higher “authority” exists than that which these authors represent; and it would be hard to find those who could set forth “authority” more gracefully. Each knows that literary enjoyment usually goes hand in hand with that wisdom which extended is the director of Life itself.

Although the sense of taste is more strictly a “biological” sense than any of the other simple senses of man—that is, more particularly concerned with the underlying bodily life—it plays, nevertheless, a very important part in our personal psychology. Many of us find in tasting one of the fairly dependable satisfactions of our everyday living; and Satisfaction, it seems upon long reflection, comes pretty close to being the long-sought “highest good.” The wholly needless and harmful bodily overweight of many of us attests how often this sense is made a malignant fetish to lure us evilward. Eve tasted—and in that alluring moment set an example too plain and too significant ever to be ignored. The sense of taste, none the less, is a wholly respectable and dignified mode of obtaining satisfaction.

And our respective “research magnificent” would not be quite so interesting, not so adventuresome, were our sense of taste, instead of a clear sense experience tingling always with some kind of satisfaction, were it, I say, only a subconscious instinct, part of the original organic nature of man, working in the dark of consciousness. And for a few of us, especially if we be chefs, or cooks, or tea-tasters, or dyspeptics, or epicures, or gluttons, or taste-perverts, and the like, taste is, perhaps, one of the most important of all mortal experiences and of all scientific themes. And to the children how much it is!

Professor Hollingworth and his Columbia colleague, Doctor Poffenberger, have written a volume which seemingly would satisfy both the scientific reader and the general readers who from curiosity seek its information. The business man as well as his wife sitting beyond the living-room table will both find the something they hoped to find; and the keen school teacher and the all too infrequent schoolmaster will find part of that material for the development of intensive sense-training now obviously indispensable to the further evolution of our school system. For even taste, least intellectual of our senses, can be intensively and hence usefully trained and thus education be furthered.

The authors need no introduction to the educated million, but if they did, this book would furnish one which the most exclusive hardly could disdain. They are to be congratulated on the success with which they have put much that is at once interesting and scientific up to the hour into little space, with “war-time economy.” The authors have covered their field well.

The editor takes this first opportunity to invite criticism of whatever trend, and to ask for suggestions, whether from sense-gluttons or from philosophers, for the better conduct and the furtherance of this series and of that other series, on “The Life of the Child,” which he is editing. As is true in a wholly different field of conquest, here, too, lies safety in numbers, and where there are many men there are many minds. As all authors at least will hasten to agree, not even an editor knows all that might be known.