Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 10.djvu/773

Rh, and assures the continuance of indefatigable research. Dr. Ferrier's investigations led him to certain important conclusions regarding the localization of functions in the brain, which have been approved by some physiologists, and criticised by others, although all agree as to the value of his skillful and well-directed experiments. The chief object of this volume is to present the author's views of the bearing of his experiments, although it contains a concise and well-digested account of the functions of the cerebro-spinal system in general, with the view more especially of pointing out the mutual relations between the higher and the lower nerve-centres. Dr. Ferrier's work was elaborately reviewed and in some respects adversely criticised by Mr. George Henry Lewes in two numbers of Nature. We have no space to state the points in issue, but will give his estimate of the work as presented in the closing passage:

was an excellent idea to get together in one compact volume the best thoughts of Carlyle, for there is a better and worse in his writings, as well as in those of all other authors. He has produced a lot of books in his day, unequal among themselves, but all containing, here and there, brilliant and powerful passages, well deserving to be thus separated and brought together for entertainment and edification at odd hours. We suspect, indeed, that Carlyle will be longer remembered for these strokes of extraordinary insight than on account of his elaborate works, in the great bulk of which there is a prodigious amount of wordiness—a fault which he so hated in other people. His works are mountainous, brilliant with gilded peaks, but with great stretches of valley between. It was not a bad idea of Barrett's to truncate the upper cones, and get the peaks all together in a single book, and, if Carlyle approves of it, as he says he does, and must do, all readers will be pleased.

have already referred to this important work in very commendatory terms, and we may add that its character is well sustained to the later issues. It is not so much a dictionary of chemistry, in which the science is pulverized into a great number of fragments, and each placed under its alphabetical head, as a work in which the great leading subjects of chemical manufacture are taken up in succession, and treated in elaborate and exhaustive essays. The work is hence in no sense a rival of Watt's "Dictionary of Chemistry," which deals with the pure science rather than its practical applications to art and manufacture. The last installments treat of the subjects of dyeing and calico-printing, electro-metallurgy, enamels, ether, explosives, preservation of food, fuel, and gas. These topics are considered with fullness, and brought up to the latest results of scientific investigation.

is a very good little essay on government, but there is hardly enough science in it to justify the author in inventing a new term to describe it. He points out the great strides of the modern physical sciences, and contrasts with them the little that has been done of this kind in the fields of abstract thought, "especially in the all-important science of government."