Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/874

852 however, the tests made by the Division show that timber that has been bled for its resin is as strong as unbled, if of the same weight. Some attempt has been made to perform the difficult task of estimating the remaining resources of the Southern pine forests, and no pains have been spared to impress upon the owners of timber lands and the operators of mills a knowledge of the treatment required to preserve the value of their investments. The volume is illustrated with many plates and cuts.

Fifty of the biographical sketches that have appeared in this magazine have been revised by the editor and issued in a volume under the title Pioneers of Science in America Appletons, $4). As the title denotes, the book includes only Americans, and is devoted to the earliest of these who were prominent in the field of science. In revising and completing each of the sketches Dr. Youmans has had the aid of some descendant or pupil of the subject in all cases but a few of the earliest. Some of the accounts have been much extended for the book. That of Benjamin Franklin, which opens the volume, is entirely new, and is the first systematic account of what Franklin did in science. That of S. F. B. Morse also has not appeared in the Monthly. Among those that have been largely rewritten are the sketches of Silliman, Torrey, Henry, Coffin, and Agassiz. New portraits have been substituted for a few made in the early days of the magazine that were not uniform in style with the rest. Steel portraits accompany the articles on Franklin and Morse, and there is a heliotype of W. B. Rogers. The latest subject included in the volume is David Dale Owen, who was born in 1807.

A handy little book embodying The Elements of Commercial Law has been prepared by Albert S. Bolles, lecturer on law in the University of Pennsylvania (Holt, $1). Under twenty heads, such as Parties, Assent, Seller and Buyer, Partnership, Negotiable Paper, Insurance, Shipping, Deeds and Leases, and Corporations, it gives systematically and briefly the substance of what the business man needs to know in order to secure contracts that can be enforced, if necessary, in the courts, and to avoid improperly jeopardizing his own interests. The volume is indexed, and the topics treated in the several numbered paragraphs of each chapter are given at the head of the chapter.

A first memoir on The Bombycine Moths of America North of Mexico, by Prof. Alpheus S. Packard, has been issued by the National Academy of Sciences. It is devoted to the Notodontidœ, and includes descriptions of the insects in their larval, pupal, and adult forms, with notes on their habits, food plants, geographical distribution, etc. This is the first installment of what Prof. Packard intends to be a general account, systematic and developmental, of our North American bombycine moths. He has aimed to describe these moths in the light of Weismann's suggestive and stimulating Studies in the Theories of Descent (1882), being convinced that additional knowledge of their ontogeny will lead to a comprehension of the phylogeny of the higher Lepidoptera in general. From the facts connected with the transformations of the bombyces, also, he believes much may be learned with reference to the transmission of acquired characters. The monograph is accompanied by forty-nine plates, many of them colored, and ten maps showing the distribution of genera. There are also about ninety figures in the test.

Part IV, Vol. X, Second Series, of the Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences is devoted to papers on the crania, implements, and other objects found by Mr. Clarence B. Moore in certain mounds in Florida. In the first paper, Harrison Allen, M. D., describes five crania from mounds on the St. Johns River,' comparing them with crania from other parts of North America. In three papers which follow this Mr. Moore describes a large number of implements of stone, earthenware, and bone, and some of shell and copper. The papers are accompanied by thirty-eight plates and many figures showing the crania and other objects of full size.

The first part of a comprehensive work by David Starr Jordan and Barton Warren Evermann on The Fishes of North and Middle America has been issued as Bulletin No. 47 of the United States National Museum. It is a descriptive catalogue of the species of fishlike vertebrates found in the waters of North America, being in a sense a revision