Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/876

856 catalogues of the new series have been published by the Bureau of Ethnology. The first of them is the Bibliography of the Eskimo language, which is spoken by a people covering a very extensive range of territory and widely scattered, and is represented in many dialects. The earliest date recorded in the bibliography is 1729, and it is brought down to include titles that came in while the work was in process of typesetting. Next in order is the Bibliography of the Siouan Languages, in preparing which the compiler enjoyed the advantage of the fact that many of those who have fashioned the literature of the language are still living, and he has had personal intercourse or correspondence with a number of them for several years. The publications of the Siouan group cover, perhaps, a wider range than those of any other linguistic group of North America. Nearly every dialect is represented in print or manuscript, either by dictionaries or extensive vocabularies, and pretentious grammars have been prepared of at least five of the languages. The third bibliography is of the Iroquoian Languages to which group, perhaps, belongs the honor of being the first of American languages to be placed upon record. The languages most largely represented are the Mohawk and Cherokee. Of manuscripts, mention is made of a greater number in Mohawk than in any of the other languages. Grammars have been printed of the Cherokee, Huron, and Mohawk; dictionaries in Huron, Mohawk, and Onondaga, and, in manuscript, of Seneca and Tuscarora. The Muskhogean Languages, to which the fourth bibliographical paper is devoted, are represented by 521 entries, of which 467 relate to printed books and articles and 54 to manuscripts.

Les Trois Mousquetaires—The Three Musketeers—of Alexandre Dumas is published by Ginn & Co., in an edition prepared for the use of schools, by Prof. F. C. Sunichrast, of Harvard College. This is one of the best works of the lively novelist, and belongs to a series to which Mr. George Saintsbury has ascribed remarkable and almost unique merits. But all of Dumas's works are liable to objection because of their containing passages unfit to be put into the hands of pupils. The present edition is an attempt to offer a condensation of the book, in which, while leaving the main features of the story and the brilliant and delightful passages untouched, all that is objectionable is excluded, and the volume is brought within such limits of length that it may be conveniently used as a text-book. The notes include explanations of difficult passages and allusions, and notices of historical persons and places mentioned in the story. Price, 80 cents.

The Young Folks' Library, edited by Larkin Dunton, LL. D. (Silver, Burdett & Co.), is a series of supplementary readers, designed to give, besides practice in reading, useful information in special fines of school study, and selections from the best literature. The World and its People is a section of this library devoted to geography. Book I, First Lessons, starts with the building of a doll's house with blocks, and proceeds to the drawing of a plan of a school-room and play-ground, a village, and a city, after which the meaning and use of a map and of the points of the compass are fully explained. Spelling lists follow each lesson, and the volume is illustrated. Book II, Glimpses of the World, aims to present such ideas of persons and places as will interest children and fit them for the study of geography proper. The maps inserted usually represent portions of the United States, and at the same time illustrate general geographical features of the world. The frontispiece is liable to give children a wrong idea of the size of the earth; it represents the globe floating in space, with a swallow the size of Greenland flying over it about a thousand miles above the atmosphere. Many poetical pieces are introduced into each book. Other volumes are to follow.

Prof. Alexander M. Bell has embodied his widely known system of sound notation in a Popular Manual of Vocal Physiology and Visible Speech (E. S. Werner, New York, 50 cents), designed as a text-book for teaching these subjects in schools and colleges. It gives a complete view of the actions of the vocal organs and the resulting elements of speech. The symbols used to represent the various motions and positions of the organs constitute visible speech. The mastery of spoken languages, the exact acquirement of native or foreign pronunciations, the correction of defects of utterance, and