Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/725

Rh The first three numbers, now before us, are filled with bright, suggestive, and practical leading articles on various points in domestic life, and several "departments" containing recipes, sensible household suggestions, hints, and "spicy" items. Price, twenty cents a copy.

The Journal of Physiology, edited by Michael Foster, with the co-operation of a number of eminent English and American physiologists, continues to publish articles of original research, and stands at the head of publications of this class in the English language. The double number for May contains accounts of investigations of taste, sensations, respiratory changes, retractile cilia in the intestine of Lumbricus terrestris, cobrapoison, the influence of calcium salts on heat coagulation of albumins, the protective functions of the skin, etc. Cambridge, England. Price, $5 a volume.

A pamphlet on How to light a Colliery by Electricity contains full directions on that subject by Sydney F. Walker, author of other papers on electric lighting. It gives directions concerning the number of lamps required, apparatus, dynamos, and their types, the engines that drive them, their position, lamps, switches, cables, faults, and many other points related to the subject. Published in New York by Macmillan & Co. Pp. 36. Price, 75 cents.

Dr. Daniel G. Brinton has printed a number of Studies in South American Native Languages, being papers which were contributed to the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society in the early months of 1892. Most of them are based on unpublished manuscripts in European and American libraries, and they include material on at least four linguistic stocks hitherto wholly unknown to students. Dr. Brinton has also added two studies of Mexican languages.

Physiology: its Science and Philosophy (The Courier Co., New Castle, Ind.), is an octavo volume in which the author, Jacob Redding, M. D., gives his ideas of the philosophy which underlies physiology and disease.

One of the latest efforts to establish a substantial identity of body and soul is contained in a book on Pluri-Cellular Man, in which the questions "Whence and what is the intellect, or soul?" "What becomes of the soul?" and "Is it possible to save the soul?" are considered from a biological point of view, by Dr. C. A. Stephens. The author conceives matter as sentient or feeling, and the living body, consequently, as composed of an aggregation of living atoms, or cells. Hence the processes of life have their origins in the beginnings of Nature. The cell "is not only a modicum of protoplasm, but the instrumentality of a self, an ego, a personal being." The soul "is the developed and experienced living matter of the body, particularly that in the cells of the nerve ganglia and the brain." The second and third questions proposed are answered in accordance with this doctrincedoctrine [sic].

The volume of the Missouri Botanical Garden for 1892 contains the third annual reports of the Board of Trustees and of the director, William Trelease, three anniversary publications, and two scientific papers. We learn from the director's report that the garden has acquired the grasses of the herbarium of the late Dr. George Thurber, Mr. Hitchcock's collection of 2,000 specimens representing the flora of the West Indies, and Mr. Trelease's herbarium of 11,000 specimens representing 4,000 species, mostly of fungi; and the Engelmann Herbarium of about 98,000, and the Bernhardi Herbarium of 57,500 specimens, have been mounted and arranged. The anniversary publications in the volume are the Second Annual Flower Sermon, by the Rev. Montgomery Schuyler; the proceedings of the second annual banquet of the trustees of the Garden, and of the second annual banquet to gardeners. The scientific papers are a revision of North American species of Rumex, by Mr. Trelease, and "the Yucca Moth and Yucca Pollination," by Prof. C. V. Riley, with notes on Agave Engelmanni and Parmelia molliuseula. Both the papers are excellently illustrated. Price, $1.

One of the fruits of the effort of Mr. Draper, State Superintendent of Public Instruction of New York, to secure comparisons of the school system of that State with those of other States and of foreign countries appears in French Schools through American Eyes, which has been prepared at Mr. Draper's request by J. Russell Parsons, inspector of teachers' classes, formerly our consul at Aix-la-Chapelle, and author of a