It is strange that not in any language has there been published a systematic treatise on Ethnic Psychology; strange, because the theme is in nowise a new one but has been the subject of many papers and discussions for a generation; indeed, had a journal dedicated to its service for a score of years; strange, also, because its students claim that it is the key to ethnology, the sure interpreter of history, and the only solid basis for constructive sociology. Why this apparent failure to establish for itself a position in the temple of the Science of Man? This inquiry must be answered on the threshold of a treatise which undertakes to vindicate for this study an independent position and a permanent value. It has been cultivated chiefly by German writers. The periodical to which I have referred was begun in 1860, under the editorship of Dr. M. Lazarus and Dr. H. Steinthal, the former a psychologist, the latter a logician and linguist. The contributors to it often occupied high places in the learned world. Their articles, usually on special points in ethnography or linguistics, were replete with thought and facts. But they failed to convince their contemporaries that there was any room in the hierarchy of the sciences for this newcomer. The failure was so palpable that after twenty years’ struggle the editors abandoned their task. But the seed they sowed had not perished in the soil. Under other names it struck root and flourished, and is now asserting for itself a right to live by virtue of its real worth to the right understanding of human progress. Why, then, this failure of its earlier cultivation? To some extent, but not in full, the answer to this may be found in a critique of the spirit and method of the writers mentioned, offered by one of the most eminent psychologists of our generation, Professor W. Wundt. With partial justice, he pointed out that these teachers proceeded on a false route in their effort to establish the principles of an ethnic psychology. They approached it imbued with metaphysical ingenuities, they indulged too much in talk of “soul,” and they searched for “laws”; whereas, modern psychology recognises only “psychic processes,” and is not willing to consider that any “soul-constitution” enters to modify of its own force the progress of the race. Wundt also asserted that the field of ethnic psychology is already mainly occupied by general ethnology, or else by the philosophy of history. Yet he did not deny that in a sphere strictly limited to the subjects of language, custom, and myth such a “discipline” might do useful work.