ABSTRACT
In 1883, James McKeen Cattell, 23 years old, stood on the steel deck of the Cunard steamship Servia, gazing east through the moist autumn air in eager anticipation. It was not his first passage to Europe; that had taken place 3 years earlier, and it was on that trip that he decided to abandon literature and philosophy in favor of the new science of psychology (Sokal, 1981). The young Cattell yearned to accomplish greatness in the labs of Leipzig. He could already anticipate the nature of the studies he would undertake in Wundt’s experimental psychology laboratory-studies he had already begun under a brief tutelage with G. Stanley Hall at Johns Hopkins (Boring, 1929). But it is unlikely, as he stood in the sea air, that he could have imagined a time would come-and come soon-when there would be a need to synthesize the findings and procedures from a growing plethora of psychological investigations-then just a trickle-so that one could make ultimate sense of them.
