Medicine: 5,940 Women

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The Columbus of Sex? For years Biologist Kinsey used to investigate the habits of the gall wasp. Since he has switched to humans, he has lost much of his scientific detachment. In his passionate lefense of the taxonomic method (the scientific classification of living things) he ignored or attacked the findings of anthropologists, sociologists and psychoanalysts. Says a friend and fellow sci-"There is too much emotion there He should have been a revivalist."

Kinsey's own emotion about science may blind him to one of science's shortcomings: the great difficulty it has in dealing precisely with the emotions of human beings (as distinct from the motions of gall wasps). Kinsey can record only overt acts, or the memories of them plus a few mental attitudes of which his subjects are sufficiently aware to tell him In the female volume, which he calls a far more human document than its predecessor, he does his best to explore the psychological factors in sex. But he can only check off emotions; he cannot measure them. He cannot detect (and this is where his kinship to Freud ends) emotional factors buried deep in the unconscious, or religious and ethical concepts which are none the less real and forceful for being "unscientific." Human beings who need ideals and emotions as well as the physical comforts of marriage have values which no punch card or computer can capture.

"Kinsey ... has done for sex what Columbus did for geography," declared a a pair of enthusiasts (Lawyer Morris Ernst and Biographer David Loth) forgetting that Columbus did not know where he was when he got there. Perhaps inspired by the accolade, Kinsey opens his second volume with the words : "There is no ocean of greater magnitude than the sexual function." Kinsey a dedicated explorer, has sailed a long way over that vast and deep ocean, but he has only fled the surface currents. His interviews are echo-soundings. Kinsey's work contains much that is valuable, but it must not be mistaken for the last word.