Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/463

Rh selected to illustrate the habits and life history of plants." The author was the translator of Oel's Pflanzenphyslologische Versuche and his book is the outcome of comments and suggestions from laboratories in which this translation has been in use. The general form of Oel's manual is followed; many cuts and a few paragraphs from the translation are used; but it has been modified and reduced in size to conform more nearly to the needs of American primary students. The text is admirably clear and the experiments Instructive and easily performed.

Prof. L. H. Bailey has compressed a wonderful amount of information between the covers of his Rule-book While of most value to the fruit-grower, truck-gardener, or florist, many of its directions, recipes, and tables are needed by every person who has a garden plot or a lawn. It contains directions for making and applying insecticides and fungicides, for preventing the depredations of small animals and birds, and for making and taking care of paths and lawns; recipes for grafting waxes, cements, paints, and glues, tables f weights of seeds, quantities required for an acre, time for planting, time of germinating and maturing, directions for keeping fruits ind vegetables, for predicting the weather, for—but we have not space to give a full table of contents. This is a third edition of the book, revised and extended, and apparently well-nigh perfected. We have not seen a better seventy-five cents' worth of handy literature in many moons.

Educational methods are being so much discussed to-day that any publication dealing with this subject is of special interest Prof. Munroe's book is a history of the changes which have come about in the pedagogist's point of view since the Renaissance. He sketches the revolt against mediævalism, with Rabelais as the moving force. Francis Bacon does the same duty in the movement against classicism. The author says that Descartes was the greater thinker, but believes that he was less of a power at the time than Bacon. In the fourth chapter he narrates the downfall of feudalism and the part which Comenius played in it. In Chapter V, The Child has Senses to be Trained, the effect of the teachings of Montaigne and Locke are reviewed. The Jansenists and Fénelon, Rousseau, Pestalozzi and Froebel, and Women in Education each have a chapter. The author's views may be seen in the following passages taken from the last page of the book: "The new conception of the schoolmaster's task makes the educational problem simpler. . . . Comenius's 'mother-school,' 'that should exist in every house,' is becoming possible; upon the fundamental plan of such a mother-school all education must be shaped. It is no longer a simple question of the intellectual value of this study and of that; it is no longer to be decided what manner and quantity of information shall be given; it is a question now of determining those subjects and those methods which shall best supplement and carry forward the training of character, the real education to true manhood and true womanhood that is or ought to be given in the home under the parents' guidance."

Biology is attracting increasing attention from students of science. In its study now lies the chief hope of solving the questions of heredity and organic evolution. The book before us is the third publication from a series of biological lectures which are delivered every summer at the Woods Holl Marine Laboratory. The first volume was received so favorably in 1890 that the authors were encouraged to continue their publication. This number contains thirteen lectures. Among them are Life from a Physical Standpoint, by A. E. Dolbear; A Dynamical Hypothesis of Inheritance, by J. A. Ryder; On the Limits of Divisibility of Living Matter, by J. Loeb; Cell Division and Development, by J. P. McMurrich; The Problems, Methods, and Scope of Developmental Mechanics, by W. Roux; ano [sic] Evolution and Epigenesis, by C. O. Whitman. The book is in no sense a popular one, and must find its readers among special students of biology and the related sciences.