Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/869

Rh system, and their poisonous action often brings on a fever similar to typhoid. The organism is poisoned by its own products. Repose brings cessation of painful frictions of nerve-fibers and shocks of muscle-fibers, and allows time for the elimination of waste products and the repair of the tissues. The construction and action of the bodily organs become so modified by training that they can do more work without fatigue than before. Dr. Lagrange classifies exercises as those of strength, of speed, and of endurance. Before passing to the general effects of exercise, he tells what groups of muscles are brought into action in the common exercises. Exercise produces salutary effects, he says, alike in those who assimilate too little and in those who do not dissimilate enough. The enlargement of the chest cavity is one of the most beneficial results of exercise, and many suppose that it can be best secured by the use of the arms, but Dr. Lagrange argues that exercises of the legs are most effective in expanding the lungs, because the legs can do more work than the arms, and thus create a greater respiratory need. The author then points out how some popular exercises cause deformity, and names others which do not have this tendency. It has been found that brain-work, like muscular exertion, is attended by a greater flow of blood to the working organ, an increase of heat, more vigorous combustion, and hence increased formation of waste materials. Mental overwork, also, leads to feverish states, which must be attributed to the accumulation of products of combustion, as in the case of physical overwork. Now, while the muscles are the immediate agents in bodily movements, the exciting cause of the movements is the will. In executing a difficult feat much brain-work is demanded in order to co-ordinate the muscles employed, and, if the brain is already overworked, the author concludes, such an additional mental task is injurious. Hence, for persons suffering from mental overwork, exercises which can be performed automatically should be prescribed, rather than exercises of skill. The volume furnishes practical information which will enable the reader to so regulate the amount and kind of his exercise as to benefit and not injure himself. Its style is simple, and the reader is led along by such easy steps that the course of the exposition can be readily followed. This latest addition to the International Scientific Series ranks with the best of its companions in importance and general interest.

author of this work, who is pastor of a Congregational church in Rochester, N. Y., believes that the "inevitable revolution which Matthew Arnold declares is befalling the religion in which we have been brought up, is part of that evolution by which God continues the higher processes of creation." He conceives the possibility of thinking under the principle of evolution and at the same time as a Christian believer, and believes that before long it will be found impossible to think clearly in any other way. The book is the outcome of a course of Sunday evening lectures which he delivered to his congregation on evolution and its relation to religion. A key to the central thought of the work may be found in a comparison, in the second chapter, between the former and more recent theories of creation. "According to the old story of creation, which was based upon no facts, but only upon a misinterpretation of revelation, God made man at one stroke, not as a sculptor makes a statue, not as an inventor makes a machine, but as the magician makes his prodigy. Accordingly, God is no constant and necessary factor of creation, but is a being who may be dispensed with, except for occasional irruptions into our region of space to perform wonders. Now r, in place of such a conception, evolution offers a far nobler one; and produces an array of facts, ever increasing in bulk and significance, to substantiate it. The process of change which goes on generation after generation, and age upon age, is creation. The Creator does not act as a magician, suddenly, as by mere impulse, but as the steady, eternal energy, and ever according to that purpose which we begin to consider." Again, in the chapter on "The Idea of God": "When we are told that evolution abolishes God, or renders him superfluous, we see, on the