In reading Nordau’s chapter on Ibsen, one cannot help wondering why our alienist has given his book the form he has. The feeling which the preceding contents of his work have more or less inspired—that there is a discrepancy between the apparent plan of the work and its execution—almost ripens into conviction on the perusal of his chapter on Ibsen. He says in his dedication to Professor Lombroso: “Now I have undertaken the work of investigating the tendencies of the fashion in art and literature, of proving that they have their source in the degeneracy of their authors, and that the enthusiasm of their admirers is for manifestations of more or less pronounced moral insanity, imbecility, and dementia.” He also says that he “ventures to fill a void in your [Lombroso’s] powerful system.” From what he says higher up on the same page about the power of books and works of art to influence the masses, and his many hints in other parts of the book, as, for example, in its concluding pages, we must understand that his great object is to do what he can to arrest the downward movement of human intelligence. He thus assumes that there is a degenerating process going on throughout civilization, but attentive readers of his book feel the whole time that this assumption, far from being proved to be correct, rests on data supplied by Nordau, which strongly warn his readers to accept them only with a grain of salt. On the other hand, there are a host of indications in all civilized countries pointing to an increase in intellectual power, moral strength, and æsthetic refinement. Some of these indications would probably not be undervalued by Nordau himself: the rapid progress of science, the increasing education among the masses, the large number of newspapers and periodicals dealing intelligently with various branches of knowledge, professions, and trades, the wider application of scientific methods to industry, wonderful inventions, not the outcome of discovery, but of intelligent induction, the decay of superstition, love of investigation, etc. Nordau, having allowed that the test of a sound mind is its ability to attend rationally to one’s business, ought to recognize that the growth of intellectual power is manifest in improved business methods, skill, manufacturing, complicated and daring financial schemes, ingenious co-operative systems, well-managed and disciplined trades’-unions, nay, even cleverly laid plots to defraud.