Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/448

440 News from 1890 to 1899' has just been issued, which supplies the want as far as the files of that journal for those years is concerned. This is a volume of three hundred and twenty-four pages, alphabetically arranged after the manner of a subject catalogue; it is an excellent example of good indexing, which may profitably be followed by other periodicals with advantage to themselves and their readers.

by Joseph P. Frizell, published by Wiley & Sons, is the first engineering book to bear the date of the twentieth century. It is a book for the practitioner rather than for the student, practical rather than theoretical, descriptive rather than argumentative. Of the five hundred and sixty pages, about two hundred are devoted to dams, about one hundred and fifty to canals and water wheels, and the remainder to the construction of power plants and the transmission of power. Much of the extended experience of the author is here recorded in a form which is likely to be useful to the enginering profession, and it is certain that as the coal deposits become exhausted the energy of waterfalls must more and more be utilized. It was a marked characteristic of the engineering books of the nineteenth century that they were adapted for the use both of students and practitioners, the same works that were studied in the classroom being the manuals for field and office work. There now seems to be a tendency to issue books, embodying the experience of engineers, which are mainly useful in practise and which are needed in engineering colleges only for consultation. One reason for this is that the number of engineers is now so great that such books can be published with profit, and another is that many details of practise have become so systematized that scientific classification of them is now possible. The economic side of engineering practise has, in fact, become of utmost importance, and the multiplication of books and periodicals is necessary in order that each designer may see the good points of the designs of others, avoid their faults, and thus make his own construction of greatest stability and usefulness at the minimum cost.

A book on 'Edible and Poisonous Mushrooms,' by Prof. George F. Atkinson, of Cornell University, has been published by Andrus & Church, Ithaca, N. Y. The author's 'Studies and Illustrations of Mushrooms,' issued as Bulletins 138 and 168 of the Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station, have been so well received, and there has been such a demand for literature on the subject, that he prepared this large octavo book, containing over two hundred half-tone illustrations. Of these, seventy are used as full-page plates, and there are, besides, fifteen species in color. Nearly all the genera of North American agarics are illustrated, and many of the important genera, such as Amanita, Agaricus (Psalliota), Lepiota, Mycena, Pasillus, etc., have a number of illustrations, while the genus Amanita, containing several of the most poisonous species, represented by about fifteen species, fully illustrated with the development and differential characters, described at length. In all, about two hundred species are described, and more than three hundred names are accounted for Mrs. Sarah Tyson Rorer writes a special chapter on recipes for cooking mushrooms, and Mr. J. F. Clark one on the chemistry, toxicology and food value of mushrooms. There are also chapters on the collection and preservation of mushrooms, how to avoid the poisonous ones, and keys to the genera of the agarics.

In the 'History of the Devil and the Idea of Evil from the Earliest Times to the Present Day' (The Open Court Publishing Company), Dr. Paul Carus has produced an interesting and a convenient manual of a certain aspect of the an