Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/874

854, and gives to each its due place. The book contains chapters on the Island of Cyprus; the shores of Asia Minor; the Archipelago; Smyrna; Mitylene and Troy; Constantinople and the American missions and schools; and the affairs and prospects of Turkey and the new states, with histories of the recent events that have led up to independence or autonomy of the latter.

is a volume of the "Illustrated Library of Wonders," of which the publishers are issuing a new and cheap edition. It relates, each story being complete in itself, a number of the most marvelous escapes of persons from extreme danger, of which history is full, beginning with the story of Aristomenes the Messenian, 684 b. c, as related by Pausanias, and closing with the escapes of Louis Napoleon from Ham, and James Stephens, the Fenian, from Richmond Prison. In it we find the narrative of the delivery of the twelve priests by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire.

volumes belong to the series of "Epochs of History," a series the purpose of which is to select and present in a separate volume, complete in itself, a group of events of such importance as to entitle it to be regarded as an epoch. In the selection of authors for the several volumes, regard has been had to the special qualifications of the writer for the portrayal of the particular period assigned to him. The former volume embraces that period—while the history of Greece was still substantially the history of the world—when Athens bad failed to weld her discordant neighbor cities into something like national unity, and the experiment was about to be taken up by the ruder states of Sparta and Thebes in succession, to end in a common downfall under the heels of the Macedonian conqueror. Greece had still great men—the soldiers of Sparta and Thebes, and Socrates—but her time of usefulness was substantially over. This volume shows the progress and the speed of the decline.

The second volume is a logical continuation of the same author's "Age of Anne," and relates to a period which was lively in British politics, and was not without brilliant deeds in the wars of other countries. While the name of the epoch is taken from English history, some of the subjects—the Turkish wars, the War of the Polish Succession, Anson's voyage, and many minor matters—are not usually treated in our school-histories. One of the most acceptable features consists in the literary biographies, among the subjects of which are Leibnitz, Newton, the poets and novelists of the period, Dr. Johnson, Rousseau, and Voltaire. Biographies of the political characters are also given, and the account of the rising known as "the "Forty-five" has been made very full.

is a catalogue of geological maps of America, North and South, from 1752 to 1881, containing 924 titles arranged in geographical and chronological order, by Jules Marcou and John Belknap Marcou; No. 8 is a paper "On Secondary Enlargements of Mineral Fragments in Certain Rocks," by R. D. Irving and C. R. Van Hise, in which something like a crystalline growth of minerals is indicated; No. 9 is "A Report of Work done in the Washington Laboratory during the Fiscal Year 1883, 1884," by F. W. Clarke and T. M. Chatard; No. 10 is "On the Cambrian Faunas of North America," relating particularly to the St. John formation. New Brunswick, and the Braintree Argillites, by C. D. Walcott; No. 11 is "On the Quaternary and Recent Mollusca of the Great Basin, with Descriptions of New Forms," by R. Ellsworth Call and C. K. Gilbert; No. 12 is "a Crystallographic Study of the Thinolite of Lake Lahontan," by Edward S. Dana; No. 13 is a sketch of the boundaries of the United States and of the several States and Territories, with an