Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/577

Rh that "work is worship"; that a quack is a Falsehood Incarnate; that on a lie nothing can be built; that the victim of wrong suffers less than the wrong-doer; that man has a soul that cannot be satisfied with meats or drinks, fine palaces and millions of money, or stars and ribbons—this is the one single peal of bells upon which the seer of Chelsea has rung a succession of changes, with hardly a note of variation, for over half a century. Anything more musty or somniferous than these utterances, so far as their substance is concerned, can hardly be found outside of Blair's sermons. Coming from a common writer, they would induce a sleepiness which neither "poppy, mandragora, nor all the drowsy sirups of this world" could rival in producing. But preached in the strong, rugged words and with the tremendous emphasis of Carlyle; enforced by sensational contrasts and epic interrogations; made vivid by personification, apostrophe, hyperbole, and enlivened by pictorial illustration—these old saws, which are really the essence of all morality, instead of making us yawn, startle us like original and novel fancies.

The volume comprises upward of twenty essays, among which "The Duty of Praise," "A Plea for the Erring," "Hot-house Education," "The Art of Listening," and "Office-Seeking," are especially noteworthy.

that the prism does not give the true values for the heat of the spectrum, and that it displaces the maximum ordinate of the heat-curve, the author has constructed and used a new apparatus—the "Bolometer," or "Actinic Balance," for the purpose of gaining a more actual value of the heat, the description of which and its operation is the chief purpose of these papers. With this instrument he has reached the interesting and unexpected conclusion that "the great proportion of all solar heat received at the earth's surface does not apparently lie in the non-luminous parts of the spectrum. Not only is the heat-maximum in the luminous part, but the total sum of non-luminous heat (so far at least as our measures extend) is relatively small."

plan of the course of which this volume is a part has been developed during the practice of teaching German. Its general features are exclusive use of the German language without the help of the learner's vernacular; attention to grammatical and lexical details; the deduction of the rules from the examples; teaching by contrast and association; and graded lessons made up of conversations on familiar topics, so arranged as to supply a stock of words for daily use in common affairs.

lots of foreign life-saving rockets were sent to Sandy Hook, New Jersey, in the spring of 1879, for examination and trial, under the inspection of the author. They were stored for several months under ordinary conditions of exposure, and then inspected and experimented with. The report describes the experiments and the results obtained with the Russian, German, English, and Hooper apparatus.

principal feature of the operations was the survey of the Black Warrior River and Warrior Coal Field, from Tuscaloosa to Sipsey Fork, conducted with a view partly to estimate the resources of the country, partly to ascertain the nature and extent of the obstructions to navigation, and the cost of removing or overcoming them. A report, by Henry McCalley, on the counties lying north of the Tennessee River is also included. Particular reports, with analysis, are given of fifty mines or outcrops of coal in the Warrior Field.