Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 10.djvu/774

754 He says, "This failure of a scientific treatment has been most remarkable;" and, as an attempt to remedy this defect by the development of a distinct science of government, the following treatise has been prepared. The little book is systematic and suggestive, and its matter is well presented; but the writer, in our opinion, has very little true conception of what science is in its applications to this subject.

is a lively, entertaining, and withal a very instructive volume on the Indians and Western life. Its author writes from observation and experience, and has a happy faculty of seizing the most striking and significant features in description, and representing them in vivid and forcible language. The work abounds in sketches of travel, delineations of camp-life, pictures of scenery, accounts of game, and episodes of sporting adventure. But its main and most important portion is that which is devoted to the religion, social life, habits, amusements, occupations, and what we may call the general natural history of the Indians. Appended to the volume is an instructive table of Indians living in the United States, omitting those in Alaska, with the numbers and locations of the tribes and fragments of tribes that still survive. The introduction by Mr. Blackmore gives some striking facts in regard to the destruction of the buffalo. He says that during the three years 1872-'74 four and a half million of these animals were destroyed, of which three million were killed merely for their hides. This is equal to the destruction of all the cattle in Holland and Belgium, and is as if in three years half the cattle of Texas, or all the cattle in Canada, had been carried off by a plague!

Mr. Blackmore quotes a passage from Bishop Whipple, on "Our Indian Policy," that furnishes an excellent example of the working of "American politics," and gives data by which we can compare the fruits of administration of the "best government on earth" with the miserable monarchy that rules on the other side of the St. Lawrence:

"One one side of the line is a nation that has spent $500,000,000 in Indian wars; a people who have not one hundred miles between the Atlantic and the Pacific which has not been the scene of an Indian massacre; a government which has not passed twenty years without an Indian war; not one Indian tribe to whom it has given Christian civilization; and which celebrates its centenary by another bloody Indian war. On the other side of the line are the same greedy, dominant, Anglo-Saxon race, and the same heathen. They have not spent one dollar in Indian wars, and have had no Indian massacres. Why? In Canada the Indian treaties call these men 'the Indian subjects of her majesty.' When civilization approaches them they are placed on ample reservations, receive aid in civilization, have personal rights in property, are amenable to law and protected by law, have schools, and Christian teachers send them the best teachers. We expend more than one hundred dollars to their one in caring for Indian wards."

years ago a sumptuous volume appeared in Paris, by Amédée Guillemin, which was translated into English by the Lockyers, and republished by Macmillan, under the title of "The Forces of Nature." It aimed to be a popular account of the great physical forces, gravity, heat, light, and electricity. By the aid of numerous and finely-executed engravings, it attempted to make clear the principles of pure science with no reference to their uses or applications to the practical arts. A companion volume has now appeared by the same author, editor, and publishers, which supplements the first, by taking up the