The course outlined differs noticeably from what has been customary in treatises on economics. The point of departure is a comprehensive general survey of the factors which enter into the growth of culture, with special reference to their economic bearing. This survey runs chiefly on psychological and ethnographic ground, historical inquiry in the stricter sense being relatively scant and obviously of secondary consequence. It is followed up with a more detailed and searching discussion of the factors engaged in the economic process in any given situation. The factors, or "collective phenomena," in question are not the time-honored Land, Labor, and Capital, but rather population, material environment, and technological conditions. Here, too, the discussion has to do with ethnographic rather than with properly historical material. The question of population concerns not the numerical force of laborers, but rather the diversity of race characteristics and the bearing of race endowment upon the growth of economic institutions. The discussion of the material environment, again, has relatively little to say of the fertility of the soil, and gives much attention to diversities of climate, geographical situation, and geological and biological conditions. And this first book closes with a survey of the growth of technological knowledge and the industrial arts. In all this the significant innovation lies not so much in the character of the details. They are for the most part commonplace enough as details of the sciences from which they are borrowed. They are shrewdly chosen and handled in such a way as to bring out their bearing upon the ulterior questions about which the economist's interest centers; but there is, as might be expected, little attempt to go back of the returns given by specialists in the several lines of research that are laid under contribution. But the significance of it all lies rather in the fact that material of this kind should have been drawn upon for a foundation for economic theory, and that it should have seemed necessary to Professor Schmoller to make this introductory survey so comprehensive and so painstaking as it is. Its meaning is that these features of human nature and these forces of nature and circumstances of environment are the agencies out of whose interaction the economic situation has arisen by a cumulative process of change, and that it is this cumulative process of development, and its complex and unstable outcome, that are to be the economist's subject-matter. The theoretical outcome for which such a foundation is prepared is necessarily of a genetic kind. It necessarily seeks to know and explain the structure and functions of economic society in terms of how and why they have come to be what they are, not, as so many economic writers have explained them, in terms of what they are good for and what they ought to be. It means, in other words, a deliberate attempt to substitute an inquiry into the efficient