Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/876

854, with stirring scenes in the councils at the Capitol and in battle at the front, and with personal incidents of the men whose names the nation loves and delights to honor. All is related in the straightforward, fluent style, touching only the facts, of a writer who has a story to tell and makes it his business to tell it. The result of the reading of the book is to arouse a new appreciation of the abilities and virtues of those great men in their various walks of civil, political, and military life, who took our country through its supreme trial.

Mrs. Arabella B. Buckley's Fairy-Land of Science has stood the test of about thirty years' publication as one of the simplest, clearest, and best popular introductions to physical science. Originating in a course of lectures delivered to children and their friends, the thought of publishing the book was suggested by the interest taken in the lectures by all the hearers. It was a happy thought, and the carrying of it out is fully justified by the result. But thirty years is a long time in so rapidly advancing a pursuit as the study of science, and makes changes necessary in all books treating of it. The publishers of this work, therefore, with the assistance of the author, have considerably extended the original volume, adding to it notices of the latest scientific discoveries in the departments treated, and amplifying with fuller detail such parts as have grown in importance and interest. A few changes have been made in the interest of American readers, such as the substitution, where it seemed proper, of words familiar here for terms almost exclusively used in England, and the introduction of American instead of English examples to illustrate great scientific truths. The book has also been largely reillustrated.

Some of the essays in Miss Badenoch's True Tales of the Insects have already appeared in serials—two of them in the Popular Science Monthly. The essays are not intended to present a view of entomology or of any department of it, but to describe, in an attractive and at the same time an accurate manner, a few special features of insect life and some of what we might call its remarkable curiosities. The author is well qualified for her undertaking, for, while being an entomologist of recognized position, she has those qualities of enthusiasm in her pursuit and literary training that enable her to present her subject in its most attractive aspect. From the great variety of insect forms she has selected only a few for this special presentation, including some of eccentric shape and some of genuine universal interest. She begins with the strange-looking creatures of the family of the Mantidæ, or praying insects, or, as the Brazilians call the Mantis, more fitly, the author thinks, the devil's riding horse, which is characterized as "the tiger, not the saint, of the insect world." The walking-stick and walking-leaf insects, of equally strange appearance, but peaceful, naturally follow these. Then come the locusts and grasshoppers, which are more familiar, and the butterflies and moths, which attract the most attention and present such remarkable forms as the case-moths and the hawk and death's-head moths. The insects made subjects of treatment are described with fullness of detail, and the record of their life histories. The book is published in an attractive outer style, on thick paper, with thirty-four illustrations by Margaret J. D. Badenoch.

Prof. Charles C. James, now Deputy Minister of Agriculture for Ontario, defines the purpose of his book, Practical Agriculture, to be to aid the reader and student in acquiring a knowledge of the science as distinguished from the art of agriculture—"that is, a knowledge of the 'why,' rather than a knowledge of the 'how.'" The author believes, from his experience of several years' teaching at the Ontario Agricultural College, that the rational teaching of agriculture in public and high schools is possible and would be exceedingly profitable, and that an intelligent knowledge of the science underlying the art would add much interest to the work and greatly increase the pleasure in it. The science of agriculture is understood by him to consist