Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/877

Rh Military Academy at West Point by General P. S. Michie, dean of the faculty of the academy, and the late A. H. Rice, ex-Governor of Massachusetts, gave Some Inside Views of the Gubernatorial Office. Six of the addresses were on public affairs; Henry W. Cannon spoke on Banking and Currency, Montgomery Schuyler on Architecture, Andrew Carnegie on Wealth and its Uses, while pure and applied science were represented by the lecture of Albon Man on Electricity, of General William A. Hammond on Brains and Muscles, of ex-Governor Alonzo B. Cornell on The Electro-magnetic Telegraph, and of Colonel F. V. Greene on Roads. The volume contains the portrait and a short biographical sketch of each lecturer. (F. T. Neely.)

The summary and index of Legislation by States in 1895, issued by the New York State Library (University of the State of New York, 35 cents), contains 4,847 entries. This bulletin, which has now been published for six years, is of great service in putting State legislators in possession of the recent work done in other States, and thereby promoting progress and uniformity. A new feature this year is a separate table of constitutional amendments arranged by States, showing the result of the vote on all amendments in 1894 and 1895, and giving also those to be submitted to future vote.

Having made a thorough lexicographic study of mineral names for the new dictionary of the Philological Society, Prof. Albert H. Chester has recently issued the results of his labors separately as A Dictionary of the Names of Minerals (New York: Wiley, $3.50; London: Chapman & Hall). He has aimed to give with each name its correct spelling, its author, a reference to its first publication, its original spelling, its derivation, the reason for choosing this particular name, and a short description of the mineral to which it belongs. In a few cases he was unable to determine one or more of these points, and he sends out with the volume a circular asking aid in securing the lacking information. Nearly five thousand names are included in the dictionary, and many of the facts concerning them are now given in a vocabulary for the first time, having been gathered from little known books or from private communications. A considerable number of imaginary derivations and other errors are corrected in this work. An introduction contains an interesting history of attempts to systematize mineralogical names, accounts of the introduction of some errors, and other similar matter. A list of works cited fills nineteen pages, and an index to the authors of mineral names occupies twenty-four more.

The Annual Literary Index, edited by W. I. Fletcher and R. R. Bowker (The Publishers' Weekly, $3.50), is an annual supplement to Poole's valuable index to periodicals and, by the addition of one feature after another, has become much more than that. The volume for 1895 contains besides the Index to Periodicals an Index to General Literature, which rather ambitious title denotes an index to the contents of one hundred and thirty or forty volumes of essays, biographical sketches, etc., published in 1895. There is an Author-index covering these two lists, which is followed by a list of the American and English bibliographies that have appeared (in treatises or separately) in the course of the year, a Necrology of Writers, and an Index to Dates of Principal Events. This last is a new feature, and besides its independent historical value it is practically an index to the files of any newspaper.

The second annual volume of MM. H, Beaunis and A. Binet's Année Psychologique (Psychological Annual) for 1895 is much larger than the first, and forms a book of 1010 pages. The volume, which is published from the Laboratory of Physiological Psychology of the Sorbonne, contains, under the heading of Memoirs of Collaborators, papers on Abnormal and Morbid Characters, by Prof. Ribot; A Glance at Comparative Psychology, by M. Fosel; An Experiment in Reading in which Certain Categories of Words are omitted, by M. Flourney; On Intellectual Phenomena, by M. Bererdon; A Note on the Conditions favoring Hypnotism, by M. Gley; and Illusions of Weight, by M. Biernleet. Other papers are given under the headings Works from the Laboratory and General Reviews. The second part of the volume contains analyses of publications and papers that fills fourteen chapters, each covering its separate department, with subdivisions; four Études d'ensemble, or General