Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/939

Rh United States, Russia, and other countries, and describes at some length the methods of drilling and operating wells in the United States, with notes on the practice followed elsewhere. The American and the Russian methods of refining petroleum, the distilling of shale oil, which is an important industry in Scotland, and the manufacture of paraffin, are then described. All these accounts are fully illustrated by figures of apparatus, and many tables of production, analyses, etc., are given. In this section there is an interesting sketch of ozokerite mining in Galicia. Mr. Redwood's chapters on lamps are of much popular as well as technical interest. His treatment is largely historical, a few lamps of the ancients being included, and the dates and numbers of the patents issued for the modern forms being given. Sponge lamps, blast lamps, and lamps for railroad cars and ships are described, as well as the more familiar forms. In this section something about the making of oil gas and air gas is also told. The subject of miners' safety lamps is treated in much the same way. These two sections contain over two hundred of the three hundred and fifty-eight figures in the volume. Gas and electric lighting are left for the next volume of the series.



the editorial care of Prof. C. Lloyd Morgan has appeared the second volume of the work upon which Prof. Romanes was engaged at the time of his death. The present volume is mainly devoted to a consideration of those post-Darwinian theories which involve fundamental questions of heredity or utility. The chapters dealing with heredity are almost exclusively concerned with Prof. Weismann's views as to the inheritance of acquired characters. Prof. Romanes presents evidence both for and against such inheritance, and while he agrees with Galton in largely diminishing the potency of the Lamarckian principles, he can not go so far as to abolish it as Weismann does. In the chapters grouped under the head of utility he vigorously opposes the doctrine that all species must necessarily be due to natural selection, and therefore must severally present at least one adaptive character as held by Huxley, and he finds still less tenable the more extended form of the same doctrine held by Wallace. Regarding the question as purely one of reasoning, he combats it by argument without appeal to facts. In an appendix he discusses some side issues connected with the principle of panmixia, and in another he states more fully than in the body of the book the opinions of Darwin and Huxley on characters as adaptive and specific. The volume contains a portrait of the author as frontispiece and several figures in the text.

Prof. Tarr's new book on physical geography has the character of those recent treatises which have appeared under the title of physiography. It is not a description of the topographical features, climate, animal and vegetable productions, etc., of the several regions of the earth in the familiar atlas form, accompanied by large maps, but rather a depiction of typical forms assumed by land and water, with accounts of the processes that have produced them. It is thus largely devoted to the dynamic side of its field. After a short description of the earth as a planet, the author sets forth the usual and the occasional phenomena of the atmosphere, and shows how these conditions affect the geographic distribution of animals and plants. Three chapters are given to the form and characteristics of the ocean, leaving about half of the book to the land. In this last part especial attention is given to such agencies of change as weather, streams, glaciers, waves, and the internal heat of the earth,