Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 44.djvu/427

Rh This is followed by an account of the principal results of meteorological observations up to the present time, and the work closes with a section on the application of meteorology to agriculture. Besides the views already mentioned the volume is illustrated with a large number of diagrams, charts, and cuts of instruments.

is a text-book for college students who have some knowledge of biology, but is not intended as an advanced treatise. The author has undertaken to describe one example of each of the larger groups, with specified exceptions, and then to give a short account of the most interesting modifications presented by other members of the group. A great extension of our knowledge of the invertebrata has been made in the last few years, leading to a rearrangement of material and a revised classification. These facts have led the author to treat the subject largely from the morphological standpoint. More space has been devoted to animals intermediate between the larger groups than to the more specialized members of the groups. The text is illustrated with 263 cuts.

former of these two very suggestive and interesting works on subjects of art is described in the subtitle as "an essay in comparative æsthetics, showing the identity of the sources, methods, and effects of composition in music, poetry, painting, sculpture, and architecture." It is the result of an endeavor to trace to their sources in mind or matter the methods employed in the composition of the art forms; and as an incidental though seemingly necessary step to the accomplishment of this object the action of the mind in these methods has been identified with its action in scientific classification; and, having arranged them according to their logical order and development and added to them those methods hitherto recognized only indirectly or not at all, their character and effects are shown to be exemplified in all the arts, including music and poetry, etc., as well as in painting, sculpture, and architecture. It takes many centuries, the author says, "for such methods to develop into arts like those which have been named. But, after a while, these all appear. It is important to notice, too, that the way in which they differ from ordinary and merely natural modes of expression is the fact that they are not used, or, if so used at first, have ceased to be used for expression's sake alone. . . . While, therefore, the art-product is traceable to an expression of mental thoughts and feelings, the elements of which it is constructed are forms borrowed from Nature, and the method of construction, or composition as it is ordinarily called, is a process of elaboration." The theoretical has been so connected in the essay with the practical, as the author hopes, to adapt the work to the wants of readers who, while interested in one or other of these phases of the subject, are not interested in both; and the effort has been made to distinguish between well-grounded tastes and mere fashions or whims.

M. Corroyer's Gothic Architecture, translated from the French by Miss Florence Simmons under the editor's direction, is intended to give such an account of the birth and evolution of that form of the art as may be considered sufficient for a handbook. The author, writing from a thoroughly French point of view, is apt to believe that everything admirable in Gothic architecture had a Gallic origin. He dismisses vexed questions of priority with a phrase, and finds French influence in the examples which he cites traceable to suggestion from a French master or a French example. In this disposition he is very like nearly all other Frenchmen, in whatever field we take them—with a few shining exceptions like M. Taine, or, in the author's own field, M. Viollet-le-Duc, whom he sometimes contradicts. This characteristic weakness may, however, be discounted, and, when the allowance is made, does not greatly affect the value of the author's observations as a picture of Gothic development. Taking an evolutional view of the growth of Gothic architecture, he points out how material conditions and