Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/582

564 something to eat) is reconstructed, and his weapons, methods of hunting, language, and clothes are discussed. The accident by which the bow and arrow were discovered is graphically related. Methods of capturing large and small game, the variations of different tribes due to varied surroundings, and, in fact, a detailed description of the manners and customs of man in the time of the cave dwellers is worked out with considerable ingenuity and care. The book is evidently the result of a considerable study by Mr. Waterloo of geological ethnology, and will be found very entertaining by all who are at all familiar with geologic history. The psychologist will be entertained by the mentality with which the author has endowed his primitive characters. The book is also rather attractive in appearance, despite its excessively modern binding.

A third edition of Mr. Albert H. Chester's Catalogue of Minerals Alphabetically Arranged, and giving their chemical composition and synonyms, is published by John Wiley & Sons. The catalogue has been intended from the beginning to embrace all English names in current use in the nomenclature of mineralogy, including species, varieties, and synonyms, and omitting dead and useless names. In the present edition, which has been revised and entirely reset, all names added up to date have been inserted in their proper order.

Prof. Clarence Moores Weed has endeavored, in his Life Histories of American Insects (Macmillan Company, $1.50), to present in a nontechnical manner the results of his observations of a few of the most interesting species, some of which he has especially studied during the last ten years; while for other sketches he has drawn upon his fellow entomologists. Among the more curious or more familiar insects thus presented and described are the crickets, walking sticks, grasshoppers, army worm, the insect of raspberry canes, insects that mark apple and oak leaves, wasps, hornets, aphides, and spiders, including "daddy longlegs." The style of the book is attractive, the descriptions are clear, and the illustrations are numerous and excellent.

Professor Kingsley's Elements of Comparative Zoölogy is intended as an introduction to the serious study of the subject, and embraces directions for laboratory work upon a selected series of animal types, together with a general account of related forms. By combining the functions of a laboratory guide and a general outline of zoölogy, it has been possible to emphasize the comparative side of the subject. But "it is not sufficient to ask one to compare a grasshopper and a beetle, pointing out their resemblances and points of difference; leading questions must be asked." Such questions are furnished, and when the student has answered them he may be supposed to have "a tolerably complete statement of the principal characters of the larger groups of the animal kingdom." Types have been selected for detailed study, partly with regard to the facility of obtaining them and partly to their adaptability to being worked out by average students, and the work has been made largely macroscopic. Laboratory work is insisted upon as the most important (H. Holt & Co., New York).

Faith or Fact, by Henry M. Taber, with preface by Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll (Peter Ecker, publisher, New York, $1),is dedicated to the lovers of mental freedom, and particularly to those who have had to endure opprobrium from orthodox Christianity. It is described in the title page as "illustrating conflicts between credulity and vitalized thought, superstition and realism, tradition and verity, dogma and reason, bigotry and tolerance, ecclesiastical error and manifest truth, theology and rationalism, miracle and immutable law, pious ignorance and secular intelligence, hypocrisy and sincerity, theocracy and democracy." It is devoted to the criticism of the orthodox branch of Christianity, which the author thinks that system has invited by the course it has pursued in various respects.

Who would have imagined that the problem of the universe could be solved in a book of sixty-five small pages? Great as the task is supposed to be, that is what seems to be attempted by Mr. John E. Atwood in his essay on the Constituents of the Universe (James Edward Friend, publisher, San Diego, Cal.). The doctrine of the book, which is enlarged upon in various applications, is that "space—extent or room—and time—continuation or motion, are the three great essentials that comprise or constitute the universe";