Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/578

560 who are to use the receipts, concerning the need of care to obtain the right materials and pure materials, to follow the directions precisely, and observe all precautions in detail. Tables of weights and measures and chemical synonyms are given in the appendix.

In the Land of the Lingering Snow (Houghton, Mifflin & Co., $1.25) a winter outdoor book is given us by Mr. Frank Bolles, of Cambridge, Mass. In twenty-six essays the "Stroller in New England," as the author styles himself, chronicles his weekly visit to points of interest within not too hard reach of his home, from January to June. They were made, in fact, twice a week, for he took both Saturday and Sunday for his excursions. In them he enjoyed the weather, whatever it might be, the exultation of facing the fiercest storms if they came, the scenery, and the birds. No stress of weather seems to have deterred him from taking his short railroad trip and long walks, or to have overcome the enterprise of the birds, which he never failed to find in numbers. On the first Sunday of the year, in the deep snow, he finds traces of a crow, fifteen quail, and a robin; the next week, when everything is covered with ice, twenty chickadees, crows, robins, and a hawk; on the third walk, in a tempest, eighty-five birds, representing nine species. They seem to have been the objects for which he was looking, and he found them. As the spring comes on and advances into summer the pictures gain in freshness and warmth, but the author's mood is always the same. It is that of the lover of Nature who sees beauty and life in all their aspects and knows how to paint them.

The point of view taken by Mrs. Wllen M. Mitchell, in her Study of Greek Philosophy (S. C. Griggs & Co., Chicago, $1.25), is indicated by her dedication of it to the Kant Club of Denver, and her acknowledgment of indebtedness to the Concord School of Phi. losophy, Dr. W. T. Harris, and the histories of Zeller and Hegel. The book grew out of the studies of the author in connection with a woman's club in St. Louis, and afterward in Denver. Her verbal expositions gradually assumed written forms, and eventually came into their present shape; and the whole bears the impress of the thoughts of the other members of the clubs as well as of the author's own. Beginning with the assertion of the identity of philosophy and the history of philosophy, the author analyzes the character of the Greek philosophy, and then considers it from the beginning, in the pre-sophistic philosophy, through all its stages of development, and as expounded by the larger host of teachers whose names have become identified with much of the best of human thought, and whose influence has endured and is still strong. An introduction is furnished by William R. Alger, who glorifies philosophy as the supreme department, the most important and most attractive branch of knowledge, setting it above hterature and science.

In Ben Beor, Story of the Anti-Messiah (Baltimore, Isaac Friedenwald & Co.; Vicksburg. Miss., the author), the supernatural and the allegorical are mingled. The aim of the author, H. M. Bien, a rabbi of Vicksburg, Miss., has been to exhibit the agencies which are assumed to have been working during past ages to suppress the rights and liberties of the people; "upholding serfdom and superstition for the benefit of a few privileged classes." The persecutors and haters of man are called as a unit the Anti-Messiah, whose story is set forth under the name of Ben Beor. This character, called after the biblical Balaam Ben Beorz, who is endowed with an immortality like that of the Wandering Jew, appears in the ancient world as the instigator of the great evils which afflicted its nations? as the concocter and distributer of strong liquors and the stimulator of evil passions » as the chief agent in provoking the siege and destruction of Jerusalem, the Roman persecution of the Christians, the suppression of knowledge and free thought which marked the dark ages, the promoter of priest-craft and the Inquisition, and the upholder of despotism down to modern times. The invention of printing and the Reformation were antagonistic to his plans, and his power and his office ceased with the promulgation of the Declaration of Independence.

The fourth volume of Prof. J. C. Branner's Annual Report of the Geological Survey of Arkansas for 1888 contains the geology of Washington County and the Plant List for the State. While it has been the plan of the survey to study and report upon geologic topics rather than upon geographic