Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 54.djvu/872

 long travel." Whence it is learned that different races can not have mutual comprehension. Luckily for the student who is unable to travel, the same phenomenon may be observed in the gulf that separates the civilized man and woman. Although highly educated, "they might converse with each other for centuries without understanding one another." These differences between races and individuals demonstrate the falsity of the notion of equality. Indeed, through science "man has learned that to be slaves is the natural condition of all human beings." Naturally he becomes dispirited, anarchy seizes upon the uneducated and sullen indifference the more cultivated. "Like a ship that has lost its compass, the modern man wanders haphazard through the spaces formerly peopled by the gods and rendered a desert by science." In France morality is gradually dying out, while the United States is threatened by a gigantic civil war. What to do is problematical, since we are informed "that people have never derived much advantage from too great a desire to reason and think," and what is most harmful to a people is to attain too high a degree of intelligence and culture, the groundwork of the soul beginning to decline when this level is reached. The remedy suggested to us is "the organization of a very severe military service and the permanent menace of disastrous wars." But if we fail to see the improving tendency of this advice, it is probably because we are like historians, "simple-minded," while Dr. Le Bon is much too complex for our understanding. According to his own theory, there is no hope that we may comprehend him, since the outpourings of a soul of the Latin race can not be transferred by a simple bridge of translation to the apprehension of an Anglo-Saxon mind, separated, as he would term it, by "the dead weight of thousands of generations."



preparing the new edition of his Text-Book of Mineralogy first published in 1877, Prof. E. S. Dana has found it necessary to rewrite the whole as well as to add much new matter and many new illustrations. The work being designed chiefly for use in class or private instruction, the choice of topics discussed, the order and fullness of treatment, and the method of presentation have been determined by that object. The different types of crystal forms are described under the thirty-two groups now accepted, classed according to their symmetry. In the chapters on physical and chemical mineralogy, the plan of the former edition is retained of presenting somewhat fully the elementary principles of the science on which the mineral characters depend, and the author has tried to give the student the means of becoming practically familiar with the modern means of investigation. Especial attention is given to the optical qualities of crystals as revealed by the microscope; and frequent references are introduced to important papers on the different subjects discussed. The descriptive part of the volume is essentially an abridgment of the sixth edition of Dana's System of Mineralogy, published in 1892, to which the student is referred for fuller and supplementary information. A full topical index is furnished in addition to the usual index of species.

The title, The Story of the Railroad carries with it the suggestion of an eventful history. The West, in the author's view, begins with the Missouri River. The story of its railroad is the story of the line, now very multiple, that leads to the Pacific Ocean. The beginning of white men's travels in these routes is traced by the editor to the Spanish adventurers of the sixteenth century,