Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/874

854 means of various occupations; and it is a training of those faculties, not so much for their own sake, though that is important, as it is for the training of the mind. While the eye is being trained to accuracy and the hand to dexterity and manipulative skill, the mind is being trained to observation, attention, comparison, and judgment." The main object of this training is educational, to perfect the system of education, and so to raise the standard of practical intelligence throughout the community.

volume is made up from four essays upon the general subject of the title. In the first, Prof. Weismann describes the place and importance of retrogression in the development of animal life. The second essay deals with the musical sense in man and animals and its relation to natural selection. The third essay is controversial, and is an answer to certain criticisms of the views of Prof. Weismann on sundry biological questions. The last essay deals with the question of the reproduction of life, and is concerned with an attempt to understand the significance of the physical facts of the reproductive process. The work is addressed to students of biology, and requires acquaintance with the present state of biological inquiry to be read understandingly.

monograph contained in the two large quarto parts of Volume II is a portion of the results of the Geographical and Geological Survey of the Rocky Mountain Region carried on under the direction of Major J. W. Powell. As described in Mr. Gatschet's letter of transmittal it deals with the beliefs, legends, and traditions of the Klamath Indians, their government and social life, their racial and somatic pecularities, and, more extensively, with their language. The group of Indians herein described comprises two chieftaincies, the Klamath Lake Indians and the Modoc Indians, the latter celebrated for their stubborn war with United States troops in 1872-'73. About a hundred pages in the first part of the monograph are devoted to an ethnographical sketch, the other seven hundred pages treating of the Klamath language and giving many Klamath texts. The whole of the second part is occupied with a dictionary having Klamath-English and English-Klamath divisions.

The language treated in Volume VI is the speech of the Omaha and Ponka tribes of Indians. Mr. Dorsey was a missionary to the latter tribe from 1871 to 1873, and resided with the Omahas from 1878 to 1880. The material of his monograph consists of myths, stories, and letters obtained from the Indians, with translations, both interlinear and consecutive. A dictionary and a grammar of the Cegiha language are in preparation.

is a book of curious interest, and, although the author confesses that the conclusions are of no practical use, and most of the results are not new, is not uninstructive. In the first of the two parts into which it is divided various problems and amusements of the kind usually termed mathematical recreations are described. In successive chapters are discussed questions connected with arithmetic, geometry, and mechanics; magic squares; and unicurval problems. In the second are discussed the three classical problems in geometry of the duplication of the cube, the trisection of an angle, and the quadrature of the circle, astrology, hypotheses as to the nature of space and mass, and the means of measuring time. Questions that involve advanced mathematics are excluded from both parts. Among the particular topics considered are the arts of coloring maps, of expressing conditions of physical geography by contour maps, games of position, the familiar "ferry-boat problems," geometrical puzzles, paradoxes on motion (sailing quicker than the wind, etc.), problems on force, inertia, work, stability of equilibrium, etc., perpetual motion, the