Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/727

Rh Russia, and an account of the preliminary work on the railway. The writers of all parts of these volumes have a special acquaintance with then-respective subjects through a connection with technical institutions or the Government service. Tables of statistics and many colored maps add to the value of the work.

treatise, which is the outcome of fifteen years of teaching and study in Harvard College may be used either as a textbook or for general reading. It opens with a consideration of the origin and uses of the atmosphere, with its extent and arrangement around the earth. As the winds arise from differences of temperature, the control of the temperature of the atmosphere by the sun is then discussed. The motions of the atmosphere and its varying quantities of moisture are next studied. After this we are led to the discussion of those more or less frequent disturbances which we place together under the name of storms. The closing chapters deal with the ordinary succession of atmospheric phenomena on which our local variations of weather depend, and the average conditions which, repeated year after year, we call climate. Some account is also g'ven of the methods employed in predicting the weather. The text is illustrated with maps, diagrams, and cuts of apparatus.

ingenious volume, and, to employ a schoolboy term, brimful of "criscross" reasonings. Though few names are mentioned, nearly all the great thinkers come under the author's knife. In fact, as the author intimates, to read the work intelligently, one must have read and widely. It is rather favorable than otherwise to allege, of almost every page within the covers, that the i-eader will doubtless, here and there, discover himself uttering two ejaculations, viz. . How does the author know '? and. Well reasoned for so ingenious a query! Indeed, at every step we encounter a forest of questions in a field of doubt. At the very opening, the critic is not only disarmed, but Prof. Bradley comes to his own rescue with his own sword, for he "would rather keep" his "natural place as a learner among learners." Hence, "if anything in these pages suggests a more dogmatic frame of mind" he "would ask the reader not hastily to adopt that suggestion. I offer him," he says, "a set of opinions and ideas in part certainly wrong, but where and how much I am unable to tell him. That is for him to find out if he cares to, and if he can." The chief aim of the book is to supply "a skeptical study of First Principles." So, the student, with this in mind, proceeds to ask how can there be, as alleged (preface), any "positive function of the universe," when "outside of spirit there is not and there can not be any reality" (closing lines, page 562); yet withal, "spirit" is nowhere in the book defined, while things around us that are generally accepted as real are (page 12*7) no "more than mere appearance." These passages detached from the text might constitute a partial injustice were they not the main makes-up of the author's labors. While paradoxes in philosophy are in the aggregate not desirable, they sometimes serve a useful end, and, on the like plane, perplexities in logic may have a place for those who care to pursue the narrow and thorny path to their hiding. One thing, though not stated, is clearly enough perceptible in a perusal of Appearance and Reality: the universe is to each one according to his faculties, and even the earthworm has its world. Instead of taking to the ocean to reach the author's distant shore, he might have landed us in a nutshell across some surer though narrower channel. The work contains twenty-seven chapters, is divided into two books, and constitutes one in Series No. 3 of the Library of Philosophy.

In a lecture on The Status of the Mind Problem, Mr. Lester F. Ward, of Washington, predicates the dependence of mind and body while carefully avoiding the predication of their identity. Concerning the "mystery of mind," he offers the simple explanation that "the phenomena of mind stand in the same relation to the brain and nervous system that all other phenomena