Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/871

Rh of a historical research appear in a paper on The Coronado Expedition, 1540–’42, by George P. Winship, of Harvard University. This expedition was sent out by Mendoza, Governor of "New Spain," in southern Mexico, and discovered the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, the Grand Canon of the Colorado, and the bison of the great plains. Mr. Winship presents the original text of Coronado's report and an English translation, together with translations of shorter papers relating to the expedition, and a historical introduction giving the events which led up to this undertaking and the circumstances under which it was carried out. Many reproductions of sixteenth-century maps and modern pictures of Pueblo Indians and their dwellings accompany the memoir. The ghost dance, which has been for half a dozen years a word to inspire terror in reports from the Indian reservations, is described by James Mooney in his paper on The Ghost-dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890. The dance is the manifestation of an epidemic of religious frenzy which was transmitted from tribe to tribe over one third of the area of the United States and then died away. Mr. Mooney accompanies his account with descriptions of similar rites among the Indians and similar frenzies among Christians and Mohammedans. The memoir is copiously illustrated.

Nearly two thirds of the volume containing the Report of the United States Commissioner of Fish and Fisheries for 1895 is devoted to a Check List of the Fishes and Fishlike Vertebrates of North and Middle America, by Jordan and Evermann. Owing to ill health, the late Commissioner McDonald was unable to prepare a report, and the work of the year is shown in the reports of assistants. Several special investigations are described in appended papers.

The statistical matter in the eighth annual report of the Interstate Commerce Commission on the Statistics of Railways in the United States follows the same order and covers the same ground as in previous years. It yields many evidences of continued business depression, although there has been a net decrease of twenty-three in the number of roads in the hands of receivers. Special features of this report are, first, comparisons not only with the preceding year, but so far as possible with the years from 1890 to 1894 inclusive; second, the compilation of operating expenses for 1894 and 1895; and, third, the table showing revenue and density of traffic for all roads whose gross revenue exceeds $3,000,000 a year.

The aim of Appletons' Home-Reading Books evidently is to give young persons a broader view of the world in which their lives are to be passed than they can get from their school books. It is not necessary that all knowledge should be gained by drudgery over set tasks; much may be imparted by books like these, which interest at the same time that they inform. In the little volume on The Plant World which he has prepared for this series, Mr. Frank Vincent has made an excellent collection of the romances and realities of the botanical kingdom. He has taken from the writings of American and foreign naturalists selections describing plants remarkable for their beauty, size, peculiar form, or great usefulness, and has scattered among them a few tributes from the poets. Mr. Vincent has not sought for the remote or startling alone. He calls upon Bonifas-Guizot to tell the uses of the cocoanut tree, and Paul Marcoy to describe the Victoria Regia, but he has also something about common grasses by Margaret Plues, and includes Whittier's poem on the pumpkin. Mr. Vincent has been in every quarter of the globe himself, and may be depended upon to select only accurate descriptions of foreign plants. Fifteen fullpage photo-engravings add to the attractiveness of the volume. (Appletons, 60 cents, net.)

Prof. Edward L. Nichols, already favorably known as an author of text books on physics, has produced an elementary work, under the title The Outlines of Physics, which is intended to be a fair equivalent for the year of advanced mathematics now required for entrance to many colleges (Macmillan, $1.40). In order to possess sufficient disciplinary value for this purpose, says the author, "physics must be taught by laboratory methods, and the experiments should be, as far as possible, of a quantitative nature." This book is designed as a text-book and a laboratory guide combined. "In the