Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/876

852 recognition and the use, in ordinary talk and work, of the English names, and a list of all the popular names of plants belonging to our area, so far as they could be obtained, compiled by Judge Brown, is given in the general English index. A considerable number of the popular names occur in the text, in connection with the leading English names, or in the notes; and several thousand others, which could not appear in the text, are given in the index in Italics. The authors believe that no similar compilation of American plant names has ever been published.

The American Agriculturist Yearbook and Almanac for 1898 is the third number of that publication, the plan of which is to make each annual volume valuable of itself, and properly supplementary of its predecessors. It proposes to be a cyclopaedia of events, a market guide, a treasury of statistics, and a reference work on subjects of timely interest. The present number contains, first, almanac matter, general notes, and agricultural miscellany; an article on Our own Country and Government, with notices of all the States and portraits of their governors; Our Neighbors North and South of Us (Canada, Mexico, and North and South America); The Great Problems of 1898 (a summary of the present condition of important questions and interests); For the Whole Family (in which a variety of useful or curious things are considered); The Agriculturist's Guide, Commercial Agriculture, Irrigation, Lumber and Forestry, and a number of miscellaneous paragraphs. (Orange Judd Company, New York. Price, 50 cents.)

Part XII, March 7, 1898, of Minnesota Botanical Studies, Conway MacMillan, State Botanist, embraces the title-page and tables of contents and the index of a series of original, most competent, and highly valuable and interesting studies of plant phenomena published as Bulletin No. 9 of the Geology and Natural History of the State, and forming a volume of 1081 pages.

Much interesting information is well packed in a small space in Prof. Sydney J. Hickson's Story of Life in the Seas (D. Appleton and Company's Library of Useful Stories; price, 40 cents). Without presuming to treat in full any of the aspects in which marine life may be regarded, the author's purpose has been only to give a sketch of some of the most important lines of scientific researches pursued by zoölogists in many parts of the world; to compress into small compass and describe in language intelligible to the laity discoveries of the deepest interest which are in many cases described in books and periodicals that do not come within reach of the general public. The first chapter relates the progress and describes the more prominent facts of oceanography. The succeeding chapters are given to accounts of shallow-water fauna, the shallow-water fauna of the tropics, invertebrate and vertebrate surface-swimming fauna, deep-sea fauna (in which many new and remarkable discoveries are recorded), commensalism and parasitism; and in the final chapter the origin of the marine fauna is considered and the reasons are mentioned for supposing that life originated in the sea.

Prof. Dean C Worcester, of the University of Michigan, and Frank A. Bourns publish in the Proceedings of the United States National Museum lists of the birds that inhabit the Philippine and Palawan Islands, which show their distribution within the limits of the two groups.

The investigations and explorations connected with the Hopkins Seaside Laboratory, adjunct to the Biological Laboratory of Leland Stanford Junior University, have been carried on by means of assistance given by Mr. Timothy Hopkins, of Menlo Park, Cal. The tenth memoir of this series is a paper on Scientific Names of Greek and Latin Derivation, prepared by Prof. Walter Miller, and furnishing rules and hints to aid in giving such names an etymologically correct shaping. The memoirs are published as a part of the proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences.

The Centralization of Administration in New York State is a valuable political study contributed by John Archibald Fairlie to series of Studies in History, Economics, and Public Law of Columbia University. It shows how power, all centralized in the hands of the Governor in the early history of the country, was gradually taken away from him during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the towns gained a practical independence in local affairs, recognized under