Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/871

Rh painful manipulation of the arm. He also considers the expression of pain in the faces of certain classic pieces of statuary. Pain is not fear, and this interesting chapter seems to have been introduced as a substitute for material that it was not practicable to obtain. Opportunities for observing fear in children, both in their waking and sleeping hours, are not so rare as in the case of adults. Our author discusses both hereditary or instinctive and induced fears of little folk and gives some suggestions as to education for courage. Other aspects of his subjects treated in the closing chapters are the influence of fear on the skin and excretions, the paralyzing influence of terror on man and animals, and the maladies and even cases of death which great fright has produced. The treatment is popular throughout, and some of the author's descriptions—for instance, those of stage fright and delirium tremens—rise to the picturesque. It contains many things that a reader would want to refer to after a first reading, but its translators do not seem to think so, for they have left it without an index.

Mr. Conant has added to the literature of the banking business a notably convenient and instructive book. His record begins with banking in Italy, in which country the bank that is considered to have been the oldest, that of Venice, was founded. This is followed by accounts of banking operations in the other countries of Europe. Coming to America, he gives a chapter each to the Bank of the United States, the State banking systems, and the national banking system now in operation. The banks of Canada, Latin America, Africa, and the East also receive attention. While the author has not departed from his historical plan so far as to write a treatise on banking, yet he does not refrain from characterizing the good and the bad features of the systems that he describes. He rates the Scotch system of banks of issue as coming "nearer to the ideal of successful free banking than that of any other country," and shows that the Canadian banks were founded on Scotch models, and the first one of them largely by Scotchmen. He also gives in his first chapter a brief statement of the theory of a banking currency, and concludes the volume by setting forth the chief advantages of such a medium. Many persons who are most firmly resisting the present agitation for a change in the coinage system of the United States are convinced that a modification of our method of issuing paper money is urgently needed. Mr. Conant shares this conviction, and in the chapters just mentioned, as well as in the one especially devoted to our national banking system, he vigorously affirms the superior elasticity of bank currency over issues of Treasury notes, and condemns many of the existing restrictions on the circulation of banks as unduly burdensome.

Another historical division of the volume relates to crises—the earlier and later ones of the present century, including that of 1893—with a discussion of the causes of these catastrophes. The tendency of the work is to reveal the operation of natural laws in monetary affairs, and to show that legislation that conflicts with these laws always works mischief.