Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/720

704 them in good condition after their installation in the museum. A few pages are then given to an explanation of the plan of the work. One of the many valuable features of the book is a color chart containing thirty different color combinations.

The remaining three hundred and sixty pages are occupied by the descriptive matter. The distinguishing characteristics of each order are first considered, including cuts of both bill and foot when necessary. Then the families and their individuals are studied. The technical description is, in most cases, followed by some observations on the origin of the bird's common name, on a curious habit which it may have, or other interesting facts, from the pen of some careful observer in the regions where this particular specimen abounds. There are a number of very pretty full-page illustrations. The book is tastefully and strongly bound, and may readily be carried in the pocket of a fishing or hunting coat.

this volume the director of the psychological laboratory in Yale University sets forth the methods of what may be called the new psychology—"a psychology of fact," as he terms it, "a science of direct investigation of our thinking, feeling, and doing." He gives twenty chapters of directions for laboratory tests of reaction-time and thinking-time, steadiness, attention, power of discrimination by the senses, emotion, memory, etc., most of them requiring apparatus of more or less complex construction. The author affects no occult profundity in this work. His style is popular and the illustrations that he uses to bring home the nature of the several faculties to the student or reader are drawn from everyday life or well-known occurrences. Thus he begins the chapter on attention by declaring frankly that he can not tell what attention is. He proceeds to illustrate the process by describing the image thrown by a camera, in which the object in focus is distinctly seen while surrounding objects appear in successively greater degrees of dimness according to their distances from the focus. He then describes experiments which consist in showing pictures, letters, words, etc., to the observer for a brief time, and from which it has been learned that four or five such objects can be grasped at the same time. The following extract from his statement of the methods of forcing attention to an object will serve as a sample of his mode of treatment:

The first law I shall state is: Bigness regulates the force of attention. Young children are attracted to objects by their bigness. Advertisers make it a business to study the laws of attention. American advertisers in the past and also largely in the present rely chiefly on the law of bigness. They know that one large advertisement is worth a multitude of small ones. A certain New York life-insurance company puts up the biggest building, the New York World builds the highest tower. Churches frequently vie in building not the most beautiful but the largest house of worship. . . . Bigness, however, costs. The art of successfully applying this law of bigness lies in finding the point at which any increase or any decrease in size lessens the profit.

Four other laws are stated and exemplified in similar manner, and the discussions of other topics and directions for experiments are quite as lively and simple in language as the foregoing. In the two concluding chapters the ways in which the new psychology differs from both materialism and spiritualism are pointed out and some account is given of the labors that have most contributed to its rise, with portraits of Herbart, Fechner, Helmholtz, and Wundt. There are over two hundred other illustrations showing apparatus, persons, and animals being experimented upon, diagrammatic records, etc.

author takes as his guiding principle the theory that the true source of solar energy is not to be found in the sun itself, but in the potential energy of space, and that this energy is transmitted to the sun in the shape of electric currents of inconceivably high potential generated by the movements of the planetary system, which is really a huge induction machine. "All planetary space," he says, "is pervaded with attenuated vapors or gases, among which aqueous vapor occupies a leading place. The planets and all planetary bodies having opposite electrical polarity from the central and