Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/144

134 Moral and Religious Aspects of Herbert Spencer's Philosophy are presented in a paper by Sylvan Drey, under three heads: First, Spencer's theory of religion; second, Spencer's theory of morality; third, the relation of religion to morality from the Spencerian point of view. The object of the essay is exposition and not defense, and the author has the happy faculty of clear statement, which such work requires. In a lecture on Primitive Man, Z. Sidney Sampson sketches the life-record of man as it is revealed to us by the flint implements belonging to the Pleistocene and possibly to earlier geologic periods, by the articles found among the piles in the Swiss lakes, etc. The lecture is devoted mostly to the discoveries and conclusions relating to the earlier Old and New Stone Periods. C. Staniland Wake describes The Growth of the Marriage Relation, giving the attitude of primitive peoples toward consanguineous marriage, some of the varieties of polygyny and of polyandry that have obtained in various countries, and the chief features in the growth of monogamy.

Two successive volumes of the Questions of the bay series are devoted to "the railway problem." One of these, by Hon. W. D. Dabney, is entitled The Public Regulation of Railways (Putnams, $1.25). It deals with the commercial relations of the railways to the public, and does not take up the regulation of the roads with reference to safety and convenience. The author discusses first the legal aspects of the question and then its economic aspects. Under the former head are considered the sources of legislative power over railroads, and the limitations of this power arising from charter contracts, from the property rights of the owners of railways, and from the powers of Congress over interstate commerce. On these subjects, the decisions of the United States Supreme Court are taken as authority almost exclusively. On the economic side the discussion is based principally upon material contained in the reports and decisions of the Interstate Commerce Commission, and in the testimony and arguments presented to that body in the report made and testimony taken by the "Cullom Committee" of the Senate, and various other reports. The closing chapters contain a brief analysis of the Interstate Commerce Act, and a consideration of the relations of the express companies to the railways and to the people.

The phase of the subject dealt with by Mr. John M. Bonham concerns Railway Secrecy and Trusts (Putnams, $1.25). The secret discounts that railways make to certain monopolistic manufacturing corporations the author regards as the most serious feature of the railway problem. In his discussion of the subject he traces the growth of abuses in railroad management, showing that they owe their existence to the faulty system under which railroad charters have been granted. He states that the commissions that have been appointed to regulate great trusts and corporations fail to accomplish any reform because they have not the power to get at the secret agreements of these bodies, and he recommends a system of inspection which will prevent the unjust favoritism complained of.

The Report of the Commissioner of Education for 1887-'88 is about as late in appearing as that of the preceding year, although it was completed three months earlier. The efforts and appeals of Commissioner Dawson for prompt publication of this document should meet with better success. Among the topics that receive special attention in the report are the condition and needs of education among the thousand Metlakahtla Indians, who have recently removed from British Columbia to an island near Sitka, also among the other inhabitants of Alaska. Manual training, industrial instruction, and education at the South, are also carefully reviewed.

A course of lectures on the Constitutional History of the United States, as seen in the Development of American Law (Putnams, $2), delivered at the University of Michigan, has been published in book form. The subjects and lecturers are as follows: The Federal Supreme Court: its Place in the American Constitutional System, by Judge Thomas M. Cooley; Constitutional Development in the United States as influenced by Chief-Justice Marshall, by Hon. Henry Hitchcock; as influenced by Chief-Justice Taney, by Hon. George W. Biddle; as influenced by the Decisions of the Supreme Court since 1865, by Prof. Charles A. Kent; and The State Judiciary: