Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/730

710 the United States as well as France is cursed, M. Proal says that "like corrosive acids," they "destroy all they touch," and "like alcohol," they "inflame the blood, agitate the nerves, sear the brain, and dry up the heart." Until the truth with regard to the facts of history and the questions of the day is set forth scrupulously, it is needless to expect an end of political crime.

Packard's elaborate Text-Book of Entomology was prepared with the wants of both the student and teacher in mind, and the book has grown in part out of the writer's experience in class work. In instructing small classes in the anatomy and metamorphoses of insects, it was felt that the mere dissection and drawing of a few types comprising some of our common insects were not sufficient for broad, thorough work. Without depreciating the importance of laboratory study, it needed to be supplemented by frequent explanations or formal lectures, with collateral reading by the student in some general treatise in structural and developmental entomology. The present text has been prepared to serve this purpose, giving, of course, with much greater fullness and detail what was roughly outlined in the class work. The aim has been to afford a broad foundation for future more special research by any one who may want to carry on the study of some groups of insects, or to extend in any special direction our present knowledge of insect morphology and growth. The number of insects in orders, families, genera, and species (they forming about four fifths of the animal kingdom), their habits and transformations, and the variety of ways in which they affect human interests, are given as reasons why they have attracted more attention from students than any other classes of animals. They are represented as perhaps more complicated in structure than any other animals. Having defined their general position. Professor Packard describes the chief differences between them and their neighbors—the crustaceans, trilobites, spiders, and others. Their morphology and physiology are considered in respect to their external and internal anatomy, under which head all their parts are described with their several relations and functions. The second part of the book is devoted to the embryology of insects, and the third to their metamorphoses. Copious bibliographical lists are appended to each of the departments, arranged by dates so as to give an idea of the historical development of the subject. A full index completes the volume.



Dr. Oppenheim's book on The Development of the Child, the subject is treated in a philosophical spirit. The author makes a serious study of the factors that contribute to the child's development and the formation of his character, and seeks to find how they may be most advantageously treated and cultivated so as to secure the best results. He makes much less account of heredity than do most authors—reducing it, in fact, to its lowest terms—and gives special predominance to the environment and nutrition. "There is not enough of conviction in the minds of parents and guardians," he says, "that the responsibility of their children's acts, good and bad, rests upon their older shoulders; that the final outcome of their 