Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/873

Rh investigations and of the practical experience of the writer in the construction of tailless kites—parakites is the awkward, half-Greek, half-English name he gives them—and in the perfection of methods for flying them in various conditions of the atmosphere. Mr. Woglom is a business man well occupied, and has give n attention to the making and flying of kites only as an avocation and recreation, without laying any claim to be a student in the scientific bearings of the subject, or in aerodynamics. Nevertheless, he never forgets the possibilities of a scientific outcome from experiments with kites, and keeps them well in the mind of his reader. His treatise opens with a view of Oriental kite-flying, its history, so far as it is recorded, from its use in Malaysia a thousand years before the Christian era, and the possible religious significance of its origin—to carry prayers to the divinities above. Descriptions of Japanese, Chinese, Javanese, and other Oriental patterns follow; then the author's experiments in kite making and flying, in photographing from kites, etc., are given, and the principles of the construction and management of kites as embodied in Oriental forms and discovered in the author's own experience are recorded, and the possible scientific applications are glanced at. The whole forms an interesting and instructive treatise.

The main object of Mr. Holden's paper on mountain observatories is to study the conditions suitable for astronomical work at high levels, while meteorological and physiological conditions enter into consideration in a subordinate degree. The author's studies bearing on the subject began during the summer of 1873 in the mountains of central Colorado. His observations were repeated at intervals till he was called to Mount Hamilton in 1888, where he has had opportunities to compare the conditions with those at nearly every observatory in the United States and with stations in other countries. His purpose in this paper is to collect and study the many scattered notices of the conditions of good vision at mountain stations all over the globe. We have thus notices or descriptions of the experiment at Teneriffe, and of the observatories at Nice, Mont Blanc, Ben Nevis, the Santis, the Sonnblick, Arequipa, El Misti, and many others abroad, and of the mountain observatories in the United States—illustrated by many photographic reproductions—concluding with a few remarks on scientific ballooning and kite-flying, from which Mr. Holden expects even greater results, at least in meteorology, than from mountain-top observation. A copious bibliography of the subject is given.

Plants and their Children, by Mrs. William Starr Dana (American Book Company, 65 cents), is a child's reading book, designed, while it entertains and instructs, to create an interest in children in botany. It consists of a series of easy lessons or readings on the wonders of plant life written in such a manner as to make them entertaining as stories. The various forms and curious features of familiar plants and trees, including their roots and stems, buds and leaves, fruits, seeds, and flowers, are thus described. The book is so arranged as to correspond both with the course of the school year and the seasons of development of plant growth.

The Division of Forestry of the United States Department of Agriculture has done a creditable service in issuing its bulletin on The Timber Fines of the Southern United States. This publication consists of separate chapters by Dr. Charles Mohr, on the species known as the long-leaf, Cuban, short-leaf, loblolly, and spruce pines, together with a brief description of the wood of these five pines, by Filibert Roth. The distribution and botanical characters of each species are given, the products obtained from it, conditions necessary to its growth, its enemies, and the forest management required by it. The information under each of these heads is full and practical. In an introduction, B. E. Fernow, chief of the Division of Forestry, calls attention to the facts that the Southern States abound in those sandy soils which afford sufficient sustenance for the pines but are practically useless for anything else, and that the forest wealth of this section is being seriously impaired by wasteful methods of cutting timber, by the repeated conflagrations that follow the lumbering, and by the operations of the turpentine gatherers. Contrary to a common belief,