Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 42.djvu/291

Rh describing one style of work after another, from the simplest to the most elaborate. The text is illustrated with over fifty figures of patterns, many of them representing work executed during the middle ages. There is also a special chapter on patterns and design. Directions for gilding are included in the volume and there is a suggestive list of articles that may be made of leather. The mechanical work of the volume is tasteful and appropriate, the leather cover being stamped with a design by the author.

Rev. Henry C. Kinney, an Episcopal missionary at the Chicago stock-yards, has published a pamphlet entitled Why the Columbian Exposition should be opened on Sunday. It is a vigorous plea in behalf of the workingmen who could not visit the fair on any other day of the week, and undertakes to prove that Sunday opening would not be irreligious nor in conflict with the Illinois statute, nor lead to any of the consequences that many pious persons dread.

The Treatise on Diseases of the Nose prepared for physicians two years ago by Greville Macdonald, M. D. (Macmillan, $2.50), has already reached a second edition. It consists of descriptions of the diseases of the nose and its accessory cavities, and the methods of treatment which the author has found advisable. A considerable number of instruments designed for nasal surgery are described and figured. There are also cuts and a colored plate representing morbid growths in the nose. In the second edition a number of important additions and modifications have been made.

Part XXII of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, July, 1892, contains five papers. In the first, On Indications of Continued Terrene Knowledge on the Part of Phantasms of the Dead, F. W. H. Myers gives cases in which an apparition has seemed to the person seeing it to act as if the dead person whom it represented had a remembrance of the events of his life, and other cases in which persons in a trance have gained knowledge that they did not have before. Mr. Myers will perhaps show later how any information as to the knowledge possessed by the dead can be gained from the workings of the minds of the living. The second paper is an account by Richard Hodgson of Mr. Davey's Imitations by Conjuring of Phenomena sometimes attributed to Spirit Agency. The conjuring includes some wonderful slate-writing and materializing tricks, and is valuable material for those who wish to combat the spiritualistic superstition. Miss R. C. Morton contributes a Record of a Haunted House, in which the main narrative is well supported by independent accounts. The third of Mr. Myers's papers on The Subliminal Consciousness follows. Its special topic is The Mechanism of Genius, and it deals largely with mathematical prodigies. The concluding paper is a supplement to Dr. Backman's experiments in clairvoyance previously published.

The society is represented in America by Richard Hodgson, 5 Boylston Place, Boston.

A very full manual of Directions for Collecting and Preserving Insects has been prepared for the National Museum by Dr. C. V. Riley. In these directions the apparatus is first described, and the student is then told how to collect in the four seasons of the year, how to find insects under stones, in rotten stumps, in living trees, and on sandy places, how to take insects of the several orders, etc. Then follow directions for killing and preserving insects, for preparing and mounting them, for the preservation of alcoholic specimens, for labeling and arranging collections, and for protecting them against museum pests and mold. Other subjects on which information is given are insect boxes and cabinets, the rearing of insects, and packing and transmitting specimens; directions for collecting arachnids and myriapods are given also. The manual is introduced by an account of the classification of the hexapods, in which some forty species are figured, and concludes with a list of the entomological works most useful to the student. The whole number of illustrations is one hundred and thirty-nine.

One of the Bulletins of the United States Geological Survey recently issued, No. 76, is of much popular and practical interest. It is the second edition of a Dictionary of Altitudes in the United States, compiled by Henry Gannett, the first edition of which was published in 1884. The present work is considerably enlarged, mainly by the addition of determinations of altitudes by railroads, so that the volume now contains 393 pages.