the results of an almost continuous series of personal experiments extending over a period of eight years. These conclusions are—to sum them up into one—that plants and flowers, particularly when cultivated indoors, are worthy to be placed in the foremost rank of sanitary agencies. Further, "the mass of evidence at hand relating to the subject, in the author's opinion, establishes the complete efficacy of living plants as preventive measures in that deadly malady, consumption of the lungs, as well as the signal services they are capable of rendering in certain other conditions of disease." We do not understand the author as recommending in-door life among flowers at the expense of out-door life—if he did, we should differ with him decidedly—but as holding flowers up as a valuable sanitary element of in-door life, and as a substitute, so far as they may be a substitute, for out-door life to those who are not able to enjoy it. A chapter is added on the practical cultivation of plants in the house; and the last chapter is devoted to the consideration of the "Sanitary Influences of Forest Growth." We have to thank Dr. Anders that he has not made his book by dumping into it the magazine articles he has written on the subject, as it is too much the fashion to make books now, but that he has written it all out afresh, in harmonious arrangement, and has thereby given us a compact, symmetrical treatise.
Geological Survey of Alabama. By Eugene A. Smith, State Geologist. Bulletin No. 1. Tuscaloosa. Pp. 85, with Nine Plates.
The "Bulletin" comprises two monographs, the first being a preliminary report on the tertiary fossils of Alabama and Mississippi, by Truman H. Aldrich, and the other "Contributions to the Eocene Paleontology of Alabama and Mississippi," by Otto Meyer. Mr. Aldrich's paper is the first installment of a work which is designed to be a complete account of the paleontology of the tertiary formation in Alabama. In preparing it, the author has personally gone over the greater part of the ground, and has collected a large part of the material himself, so that he has been able to give to each species both its locality and its exact place on the stratigraphical scale. The work is, therefore, not a bare description of species, but it illustrates very fully the distribution of the species both in time and space. To it Dr. Smith adds a summary of the lithological and stratigraphical features and subdivisions of the various deposits which make up the tertiary formation in Alabama. In Dr. Meyer's paper a number of new or previously unfigured species of invertebrates are described and figured, and a very few known species are refigured for some special reasons. The type specimens of the fossils are in the author's collection.
Report of the United States National Museum, under the Direction of the Smithsonian Institution, for the Year 1884. Washington: Government Printing-Office. Pp. 458.
This report constitutes Part II of the Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution. A clear account is given in the report of the assistant director of the organization, administration, and arrangement of the museum collections. In the account of the function and aims of the museum, reference is made to the attitude occupied by some special investigators who are disposed to neglect the claims of the educated public to the enjoyment and instruction which museums afford, and demand that those institutions be administered for the benefit solely of persons engaged in research, as the manifestation of a spirit which defeats its own purpose. "The experience of Europe with its magnificent educational museums, and the history of the several expositions in the United States should be quite sufficient to satisfy any one who has studied the matter that the museum is an educational power even more influential than the public library." The show of specimens in the cases was, in the year covered by the report—and presumably still is—but a feeble index to the richness of the collections, for "the development of the exhibition series is necessarily slow, since it is not considered desirable to place on exhibition specimens which arc not fully explained by printed labels, . . . The extent and nature of the work of the museum are not appreciated by persons who are not familiar
