Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 44.djvu/135

Rh in Europe. The articles reported upon are cotton textiles, cotton yarns, woolen and worsted textiles, woolen and worsted yarns, linen textiles, silk textiles, window glass, green-glass bottles, flint-glass bottles, and lamp chimneys.

author has already published The Trees of Northeastern America and The Leaf-collector's Handbook, and is preparing The Vines of Northeastern America—the four constituting a series of work which the botanist, the admirer of native plants, and the possessor of a home to be adorned, can not fail to find useful and acceptable in every way. The purpose is to furnish means by which one strolling in the woods can easily recognize the woody plants he meets, and information concerning their adaptability to planting in the houseg-rounds; or to introduce the many who have no technical botanical knowledge to the author's "friends, the shrubs." The shrubs described are those which are found native in Canada and the United States east of the Mississippi River and north of the latitude of southern Pennsylvania; and with them, the more important of the introduced and naturalized species. Besides the botanical descriptions—which are clear, easy, and satisfactory—and one hundred and sixteen illustrative plates, there are given a list of families and of genera, directions and a key to the signs used, guides to the shrubs by flower, by leaf, and by fruit, an explanation of terms, a glossary, a list of shrubs worthy of cultivation, and an index to the shrubs.

papers in this volume relating to city homes are partly historical, and treat of the evolution of the plans from the first attempts to adapt room space to narrow lots, to the modern styles. The first one, by Mr. Sturgis, on the City Homes in the East and South, relates to houses in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond, Va., etc. The views and plans show how the New York house, and still more the Boston house, were cramped by the small size of the lot and the high price of land; while the houses in the more southern cities, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Richmond, with greater freedom of space, were expanded, and much more convenient and comfortable; and an almost endless variety prevails in the cities farther south. Mr. John W. Root begins his account of the city house in the West by showing how the device of the "balloon frame" has assisted in the spread of settlement and civilization; for almost any one can put up that kind of a house, with the simplest implements, in a short time and at comparatively little cost; and it resists the high winds very well too. The younger Western cities are more than half built of such houses; and they are beneficial to the city's future and to its architecture, for because of them "every old Western city must be almost entirely rebuilt, and this under modern and enlightened auspices, as if it had been devastated by a great fire or cyclone. . . . It certainly presents possibilities to the architects of the West such as have never been given to any other groups of men." On the other hand, the balloon-framed house can never become a landmark, or a link in the architectural development of the country. Western city houses are marked by the absence of blocks like those of the Eastern cities, by the tendency toward greater enlargement and importance of the living and dining rooms at the expense of the parlor and living rooms, and by their openness. The outlook for Western city houses seems to be promising. The architecture is free from the bondage of architectural tradition, and among the various rival cities dominant fads are likely to become less common, and problems will be more generally determined by the nature of the case. In the subject of The Suburban Home, Mr. Bruce Price has a theme on which, regarding the colonial houses, the old country houses, the transitory styles of the later past, the present styles, and their tendencies, he might write well for an almost indefinite length. He satisfies himself with considering chiefly the more