am grateful for the editor's invitation to comment upon the article, Prefatory Findings in the Sociology of Missions, by David R. Heise. find it very interesting and occasionally provocative reading, particularly with my own personal background of sociological training, missionary experience, and administrative responsibility. It is always fascinating to see oneself and one's profession through the eyes of objective observers who speak the idiom of another and highly developed discipline. have always appreciated the description given by an African who for the first time in his life saw a tennis net: What a wonderful way to tie together one thousand holes with a single piece of string I feel that many of the insights and observations that Mr. Heise has made are revealing and pertinent, but they also fail to understand the basic motivations, the warmth of personal affections, and the ability to respond to different situations in appropriate ways that are also marks of the missionary movement. The more general findings would be equally applicable to inter-cultural contact in the field of political and economic relationships as much as they are in the field of religious inter-penetration. am not thereby inferring the assumption made by some that missions were simply a function of colonialism. The fact is, rather, that the basic relationships between developed and under-developed nations, privileged and under-privileged cultures, individuals high in the scale of economic, social, and educational privilege and individuals who have shared none of these assets, are subect to the same stresses and strains, and thereby to the same techniques whether of development or of exploitation in all realms of human relationship. wonder if this is a study of sociology of missions, rather than of the sociology of inter-cultural contacts, merely because more missionaries wrote more articles and more doctoral theses than happened in the case of other professional groups. The resources quoted are excellent sources, though they vary widely in geographic location, the type of culture involved, the particular discipline and group of readers to which they are addressed and, most significantly of all, in date. To generalize from India to Samoa to Buganda and to the American Indian Pueblo involves a stretch of comparative anthropology that few can encompass. Even within strictly missionary literature, one who would read publications of 1908 and of 1960 needs not only a glossary, but a glossary with extensive semantic footnotes to explain the differences in missionary vocabulary in the meanwhile. Add to this the wide diversity of the missionary groups generally described as fundamentalist and as liberal, one needs a semester course in comparative religion.