Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/581

Rh sketches and stories, like the smoking-saloon yarns of the second chapter, Mr. Reeves gives his experiences and impressions of the Friendly Islands, Tonga and its recent troubled history, "Kava and some Customs," Samoa, the Fijian group, the Cook group, and the Society Islands, adding obiter observations and incidents of various sorts, and not by any means omitting solid information. The last chapter relates to the missionaries, and is unfriendly to them.

In a sermon on The Evolution of a Sentiment—Kindness to Animals in the Christian World, the Rev. Newton M. Mann, of Omaha, argues that the duty of kindness and tenderness to animals is not an original Christian doctrine and is nowhere mentioned in the Scriptures, but is of later development; and that the Hindus long anticipated Christians in enunciating it. (H. S. Mann, Omaha. Five cents.)

The Chemical Publishing Company, Easton. Pa., publishes Methods for the Analysis of Ores, Pig Iron, and Steel, in Use at the Laboratories of Iron and Steel Works in the Region about Pittsburg, Pa.; contributed by the chemists in charge, and edited by a committee of the Chemical Section, Engineers' Society of Western Pennsylvania (price, $1). In a circular inviting these articles from chemists the committee defined the aim of the section to be to secure accurate statements of analytical processes, describing with minuteness and clearness the successive steps, in order that the compilation may represent as correctly as possible the present status of analytical chemistry as applied to iron and steel. Sixteen responses were received, detailing the methods pursued at as many furnaces. They are all given in this volume, with an appendix containing various special methods of analysis of ores and furnace products.

Prof. Alfred Fairhurst, of Kentucky University, publishes in the volume entitled Organic Evolution Considered the objections to the theory of organic evolution that have occurred to him from time to time in the course of his discussions of the subject in his college classes. He finds that organic life can not be accounted for as a function of chemistry, energy, or spontaneous generation; that natural selection does not afford an adequate explanation of the varieties of life, the argument for it is inadequate, and the objections to it are forcible; and "that the lack of harmony in the teaching of evolutionists shows that there is much vagueness as to the details of the theory"; that many difficulties beset the argument from paleontology; failure of the argument from embryology to cover the ground sufficiently; and special objections. Under the head of Several Chapters on Other Subjects included in the book may be placed the chapters on Instincts, The Origin of Man, a Future Life, Design in Nature, Evil and Altruism in Nature, and Agnosticism. The author presents his arguments in good shape and with good temper, but they seem to us to relate to a phase in the discussion that has been passed by both sides. (Published by the Christian Publishing Company, St. Louis.)

The Phylogeny and Taxonomy of Angiosperms was the subject of the address of the retiring president, Charles E. Bessey, of the Botanical Society of America, in August, 1897. The author approached the problem by the three lines of investigation—viz., the historical, in which the materials are supplied by phytopaleontology; the ontonogenetic, in which the development of the individual supplies the necessary data; and the morphological, in which the different development of homologous parts supplies our index of relationship.

The principal portion of Part XXXIII of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research is taken up with Dr. Richard Hodgkin's Further Record of his Observations of Certain Phenomena of Trance (Mrs. Piper's case). The development of automatic handwriting is considered, and the indications are noted of the trnthtruth [sic] of the "spirit" hypothesis as against that of telepathy from the living. In a supplementary article Mr. Harlow Gale gives an account of Psychical Research in American Universities.

Another of those clear, practical, wholly readable and wholly comprehensible garden manuals by L. H. Bailey, and published by the Macmillan Company, is The Pruning Book, a monograph of the pruning and training of plants as applied to American conditions. No prefatory ceremony is observed, but the reader is introduced at once to "the