Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/582

564 fundamentals." The philosophy of pruning is explained and illustrated by recording and picturing the history of a branch, and it is shown that pruning does not devitalize plants, but increases vigor by removing that which would perish or be weak in the struggle for existence, and concentrating the nourishment in the rest. The nature and relations of the fruit bud are described, as to different fruit trees; the nature of wounds and the healing of them are treated of in a separate chapter; the principles of pruning are unfolded; and under the heading of the incidentals the details of the art are described, with its special applications to different trees and in "some specific modes of training," and three chapters are given to the grapevine.

We find The Plant World: a Monthly Journal of Botany, edited by F. H. Knowlton, of the United States National Museum, a work of attractive qualities. The articles in the third number—the only one we have received—are brief, fresh, and to the point, furnished by competent botanists and original observers. The magazine is published by William N. Clute & Co., at Binghamton, N. Y., for one dollar a year.

The Little Pottery Objects of Lake Chapala, Mexico, described by Prof. Frederick Starr, in a bulletin of the Anthropological Department of the University of Chicago, consist of vessels, ladles, spindle-whorls of terra cotta, considerable numbers of which were found in the lake, but none in sites on the land. They are too small for any practical use, but are made with much artistic taste and skill. Professor Starr explains them tentatively as votive offerings let down into the water by cords passed through holes provided in most of them, or in which resin or gum may have been burned, or other offerings placed. They are not unique, for the American Museum of Natural History in New York has similar objects from Tillo, Oaxaca, and others are said to have been found near Palenque and near Tehuantepec.

Mr. William Paul Gerhard, a distinguished sanitary engineer and writer on the subject, has given in a little book entitled Sanitary Engineering, published by himself at 36 Union Square, East, New York, a comprehensive manual of the qualifications and duties of the sanitary engineer, considering the subject wholly from a practical point of view. A course of study in sanitary engineering is described, intended to embrace a general knowledge of civil engineering, architecture, and sanitary science in all their branches; under the head of General Practice of the Sanitary Engineer are given brief directions and hints concerning water supply, sewerage, purity of water courses, sewage disposal, street pavements, street cleaning, removal of ice and snow, removal of refuse, laying out of cities and towns, sanitation of towns and houses, and a variety of kindred subjects; and the appendix includes an article on The Work of the Sanitary Engineer in Time of Epidemics, in Time of War, and in Sudden Calamities in Civic Life.

The Ninth Annual Report of the Interstate Commerce Commission on the Statistics of Railways for the year ending with June, 1896, contains the usual reports and summaries of the statistician, a summary of railways in the hands of receivers, notes of decisions, and detailed statistical tables of mileage, corporate charges, receipts and expenditures, etc. But little change is shown from the conditions that prevailed in the year preceding.

In The Fungous Foes of the Farmer, a more than ordinarily useful contribution to the Bulletins of the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture, Prof. Byron D. Halsted undertakes briefly to describe the worst fungous diseases of the farmer's crops and to give methods that have been successful in contending with them. As far as possible, the fungi have been considered in the order of their importance with each crop, beginning with those of the field and ending with those of the garden.

The first three volumes of the Observations made at the Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory were numbered XX, XXX, and XL, the more easily to distinguish them from the other volumes of the Annals of the Astronomical Observatory at Harvard College; but the system could not be continued indefinitely without leaving too many numbers to be assigned to later volumes not yet published, so the report for 1896 is numbered Volume XLII The whole of the Blue Hills having been taken by the Metropolitan Park