Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 21.djvu/428

416 than it has since become, and he was always marked for the reasonableness and temperateness of his views, and the ability and power with which they were presented.

Myron Holley was one of the personalities that are not to be forgotten, and we have again to thank Elizur Wright for his painstaking and generous efforts to rescue from forgetfulness a character so worthy to be remembered, and admired, and emulated.

Station has been occupying borrowed quarters in the Sheffield Scientific School, which were so limited that it has been able to do little else than oversee the analysis of fertilizers. This it does gratuitously when consumers of the fertilizers, for moderate fees when proprietors and sellers, are its customers. It having become necessary to remove the Station, the director suggests it be given a situation where it can test the agricultural value of the fertilizers, and perform other experiments in practical agriculture. The act of Connecticut in establishing the Station been responded to in other States. New Jersey has a Station in connection with the Agricultural College at New Brunswick, which enjoys the advantage of a farm. North Carolina has lately furnished its station with excellent accommodations at public expense; and New York is organizing a station at an outlay of $20,000 a year. The report contains very full accounts of analyses and valuation of different kinds of fertilizers, and papers on fodders and feeding-stuffs, with their analyses. Of immediate and practical interest are articles on the feeding of milch-cows at different dairies and the New Jersey Experimental Station, and on feeding with ensilage.

author apparently belongs to the band of Theosophists, and asserts that the wisdom of the ancients survives as what he calls the occult philosophy, and that "it was already a system of knowledge, that had been cultivated in secret and handed down to initiates for ages, before its professors performed experiments in public to impress the popular mind in Egypt and Greece. Adepts of occultism in the present age are capable of performing similar experiments, and of exhibiting results that prove them immeasurably further advanced than modern science in a comprehension of the forces of nature." He claims, also, that these adepts have peculiar knowledge of the mental and spiritual world. He has met this science during his travels in India, and has assumed to describe in this volume his experiences of it. and the knowledge he has gained respecting it. Those who read the book with the expectation of finding anything in it to confirm the high-sounding pretensions declared at the start will be disappointed.

doctrine of this book is that "the race might be greatly improved by wiser and more sanitary marriages, and by more physiological parentage"; and the author suggests that, "if the average standard of ability of the race in intellect, in morals, and in physical power were raised one degree during each century, the results could hardly be estimated." The subject deserves discussion in a practical, common-sense manner, and receives it here.

author has endeavored to show in this work that there is an essential difference between the religious temper of the Aryan race and the Semitic. "Our villages to-day," he says, "are Aryan settlements in their vital points, not Semitic inclosures; and it is so with our religion—at bottom it is pagan still." He has also tried to show that revealed religion is not directly attacked by the discoveries of Science. "Only Natural Religion"—which is regarded by him as the foundation of paganism—"is now assailed in her own house, by her own children, and with her own weapons. This has come to pass through the further