Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/579

Rh of the life histories of plants. It seeks a new presentation of the subject, making use of the best modern method of study, and giving prominence to laboratory processes. The course of study outlined in it is intended to give the student a general view of the subject, and at the same time to lay a foundation on which more advanced studies may be built. As the length of time given to the study of botany differs widely in different schools, the author has endeavored to furnish a course that may be made very elastic; and room is therefore provided in it for selections, in aid of which a few hints are given. A considerable amount of previous study is supposed to have been given to the gross morphology of the parts of flowering plants, with some attention to the division into groups and classes, and knowledge enough of analysis to find the names of plants. "With this preparation it seems. . . that the pupil can enter with profit upon a course which will give him a general view of the whole plant world, beginning with plants of the simplest organization." Such is the present course. The explanations to the experiments are clear and direct.

Mr. Mallock, in his Aristocracy and Evolution, has submitted the preachings of the socialistic and labor agitators with arguments drawn from philosophy. Mr. Freeman Otis Willey attacks them and disposes of most of them in The Laborer and the Capitalist by subjecting them to the test of plain common sense. He takes them up as they are declared on the street, in the press, from the pulpit, in the legislative halls, and on the stump, and, one after another, exposes the practical fallacies that are in them. Thus he does with the questions of monopoly, the accumulation and concentration of wealth, the relations of capital and labor, railroads, rented homes, wages, taxes, etc.; as to all of which points the practical method of looking at the subject and treating it gives his observations great force.

In the series of Physical and Electrical Engineering Manuals of J. Henderson and S. Joyce, it is the object of the authors to provide a course of instruction for carrying out a progressive series of experiments in the subjects, arranged so that the usual apparatus at the disposal of a laboratory, though not especially designed for any particular experiment, may, nevertheless, be used with advantage in a variety of ways. They have also sought to arrange experiments of such character that a student working alone may be able to obtain satisfactory results. The second volume of the series is devoted entirely to practical work in electricity and magnetism, the department of physical work being reserved for a volume by itself. The introductory chapter contains a most excellent series of instructions as to the methods of observation and the manner of making them. The student "must never be in a hurry. A week spent in discovering and overcoming some source of error will be well-spent time, and may be of more educational value than the performance of the original experiment itself. Above all things, however, the experimenter must be methodical," and more of similar tenor. Exact directions are given, likewise, concerning the management of the instruments. The measurement of resistance is dealt with first in the order of experiments, with a brief account of the methods of measuring in absolute units. In choosing methods for the various measurements it has been the aim to take only those best suited for the purpose. Lists are given, at the end of each chapter, of references to the more important original papers bearing on the subject of the chapter to be found in the scientific periodicals.

Mr. R. Floyd Clarke assumes that the law seems to laymen and to some who attempt the study of it a crabbed, difficult, and dry pursuit, and attempts in his Science of Law and Law-making to make clear to average readers some of its truths and introduce them to a correct conception of the system under which they live. While admitting it as true that the detail and doctrines