Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/293

Rh serve as a valuable adjunct in every student's library.

In continuation of the archæological work of the late Prof. Eben Norton Horsford, his daughter, Miss Cornelia Horsford, has published together a paper by her father entitled Leif's House in Vindand and one by her on Graves of the Northmen (Damrell & Upham, Boston). The former describes excavations made by Prof. Horsford in Cambridge on the site of a dwelling which he identified as one built by the Norse discoverers of America, the latter describes similar excavations made by his daughter on the site of a similar dwelling near by. Among the discoveries on these spots are parts of the foundation walls, fireplaces, charcoal, shells of mollusks, and the teeth and bones of a deer. Miss Horsford has also opened two grave mounds, but has not opened what she thinks may be the grave of Thorbrand the Valiant, preferring to leave this work to an experienced archæologist.

An Iowa Geological Survey, apparently the third one, was organized in 1892, and has issued its First Annual Report. The most extended paper in this volume is a general account of the Geological Formations of Iowa, by Charles R. Keyes, the Assistant State Geologist. There is an account of Cretaceous Deposits of Woodbury and Plymouth Counties, by the State Geologist, Samuel Calvin, a Catalogue of Minerals, and papers on Limestones and Lava Flows. Ten plates and twenty-six cuts illustrate the text. A bibliography of two hundred and fifty pages included in the volume shows that its field is not an untrodden one.

Whenever a public library is started one of the first and most important tasks of its managers is to make up a list of books as the foundation of the collection. Most of the labor of this task could be saved in every case if a carefully made list were obtainable that need only be slightly changed so as to fit it to the requirements of the library in question. At the Columbian Exposition the American Library Association exhibited a popular library of five thousand volumes, in which were illustrated the most approved methods of shelving, cataloguing, and issuing books. A catalogue of this collection has been issued by the Bureau of Education, under the title Catalog of A. L. A. Library, and is designed to serve the purpose of a list the need of which is indicated above. The committee in charge of the work does not claim that the A. L. A. Library is an ideal selection, but that it is a good working library, and that no board of trustees would make a mistake in duplicating it. The Catalog really contains two catalogues of the books selected—one arranged according to the Decimal system, the other according to the Expansive system. The books in the classes of fiction and biography are not given in the classed catalogues, but in separate alphabetical lists. A large proportion of the books exhibited were given by their publishers. The collection was to be, and probably now has been, deposited with the Bureau of Education at Washington, for permanent exhibition. The selection of the A. L. A. Library might be criticised as better adapted to a community of students than to the users of the ordinary popular library. Seventy-five to eighty per cent of the circulation of every popular library is fiction, but only a fraction over fifteen per cent of the books in this collection is fiction. this library tries to cover all fields of knowledge fairly well, and what it shows is not so much what the average reader would want as what he ought to want.

The Report of S. P. Langley, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, for the Year ending June 30, 1893, presents briefly a general account of the Institution, and in the appendixes summaries of the reports of the officers in charge of the National Museum, the Bureau of Ethnology, the Bureau of International Exchanges, the Zoölogical Park, and the Astro-physical Observatory.

Several numbers of Aëronautics, a monthly journal devoted to the subject indicated by its name, have been received since last October, when it was established by M. N. Forney, publisher of the American Engineer and Railroad Journal and various engineering books (47 Cedar Street, New York, $1 a year). It is to contain in twelve numbers the papers presented to the Congress of Aërial Navigation held during the World's Fair, besides other articles, notes, comments, news, etc. Among the papers contained in the first four numbers are On the Problem of Aërial Navigation, by the