Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/128

118 the distribution of the principal agricultural products. Any one who will familiarize himself a little with these maps, and then deliberately read the book, will probably get a great deal more knowledge than he could obtain by months of travel in the Russian Empire.

readers are not altogether unfamiliar with the matter contained in this "Report," for we have from time to time during the past year made selections from the monthly reports, especially of observations and experiments made by Mr. Glover and Mr. McMurtrie, respectively the botanist and the chemist of the department. These are repeated in the annual report, or, rather, they are bound up with it. The volume also contains papers on the forest-trees of the United States, varieties of fruits, alfalfa, the French mode of curing forage, hog-cholera, and several other subjects of interest to the agriculturist.

series of handy volumes on applied science to which these two treatises belong needs no commendation from us. The works are of a severely practical nature, and their merits are well understood by the engineers and mechanicians to whom they are addressed.

attempts in this little pamphlet to discuss the question of alcohol in "its physical, moral, and social effects," and yet he finds room for a long chapter of twenty-seven pages on "Wine and the Bible," in which he wrestles manfully with such contradictory texts as those which call wine "cruel venom of asps," and those which say that "it maketh the heart glad."

title-page is itself a history of this remarkable work. To the student of the social sciences this pamphlet is a valuable contribution, giving as it does in tabulated details the lives of a family of large numbers, whose condition had become so fixedly criminal that harlotry, bastardy, and a career of law-breaking, ever gravitating prisonward, had become the inevitable heirship of the "Jukes," the word itself becoming a synonym of evil.

above are from the "Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences," 1876; each has the common heading, "Early Migrations," and their author is Charles Wolcott Brooks. The pamphlets give evidence of large research, and are at least ingenious. The drift is toward the settlement of China from the American Continent, probably Peru. Is not the following statement made carelessly? "North American Indians have never been cannibals" ("Origin of the Chinese Race," p. 27). Do not the discoveries of the late Prof. Wyman, in the shell-heaps of Florida, speak to the contrary?

interesting résumé of the year, in matters pertaining to the biological sciences, with, perhaps, a special attention to home work.