Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/867

Rh common type, and this is strikingly similar to the popular conceptions of the Aryans and other great races when not identical with them. The stories are classified as traditional stories regarded as fictitious; stories reported as true, or anecdotes; historical narratives; stories of moral philosophy, or proverbs; poetry and music, and riddles. The myths and tales of the negroes in America are all derived from African prototypes, and through the American negro have exercised a deep and wide influence on the folklore of the Indians, and even of the American white race. This fact gives strong incentives to the study of the subject by Americans. Besides the stories, an analysis is given of their general features, a bibliography, directions for the pronunciation of Ki-Mbundu, a description of the country and people, and copious illustrative notes.

whole number of pupils in schools of all grades, public and private, is given at 14,669,069, constituting 23·09 per cent, or not quite one fourth, of all the population. Besides these are to be counted pupils in evening schools, art, industrial, and business schools, schools for defective classes and for Indians, in all about 300,000 pupils, which would swell the whole number to nearly 15,000,000. The commissioner remarks upon a correspondence between the waves of industrial prosperity and depression that pass over the country and the relative attendance upon the private and the public schools. The whole number of teachers in schools of both kinds is nearly 425,000. The entire expenditure during the year for public schools was $146,800,163, or $17.67 for each pupil attending 135'7 days, and $2.31 per capita of the whole population. Of the income for schools nearly seventy per cent comes from local taxes and nineteen per cent from State taxes. Besides these and other statistics of the schools in the United States, the first volume of the report gives papers on Secondary Education in New Zealand; Education in France; a review of the Educational Systems of England and Scotland and their Operations for 1890-'91; the Educational System of Ireland; Industrial and Technical Education in Central Europe, Education in Russia, Japan, Italy, Corea, and Hawaii; Legal Education in the United States and in Canada, Australia, Spanish America, Japan, and China; Colleges of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts. The second volume gives a "Name Register" of State and City Educational Officers; statistics of city, secondary, higher, and professional schools; papers on Education in Alaska, the Education of the Colored Race, Class Intervals in City Public Schools, Educational Statistics, discussions of current educational questions, a report on the physical and mental condition of 50,000 London school children, and Facilities in Experimental Psychology in the Colleges of the United States. These articles are followed by statistical tables.

essays contained in this volume are concerned mainly with the question whether the Old Testament is wholly true or partly legendary. The first three, however, have no direct connection with those that follow. They deal with the discoveries and inductions of paleontology, and can be said to bear upon the above question only by furnishing samples of the scientific method of research. They include Prof. Huxley's lectures on evolution delivered in New York in 1876, and his lecture on the Method of Zadig. The fourth essay of the volume, entitled The Interpreters of Genesis and the Interpreters of Nature, was written for a controversy' with Mr. Gladstone upon the correctness of the account of creation in the book of Genesis. The one following—Mr. Gladstone and Genesis—is a continuation of the same theme. In both of them Prof. Huxley denies that the order in which the several kinds of living creatures are said to have been created is the same as that revealed in the records of paleontology. In the next two essays he gives the facts which conflict with the story of the Noachian Deluge. The last in the volume is A Study of the Evolution of Theology, the data for which are drawn from the practices of the ancient Israelites and of certain Polynesian tribes.

Believing that all claims to infallibility