Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/721

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LITERARY NOTICES.
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scribed with enthusiasm, and her subsequent experiences as teacher in eleven schools, ending as Dean of the Woman's College at Evanston, are vividly given with interesting details. Miss Willard was by nature, however, neither a student nor a teacher. Routine was distasteful to her, and patient interrogation of Nature or life was foreign to her restless disposition. The opportunity for extensive travel with a friend accorded with her desires, and two years were spent abroad journeying over Europe, Syria, and Egypt. Shortly after her return she was invited to lecture upon her foreign gleanings, and soon drifted into public speaking. The latter and larger half of the book is devoted to the organization of the W. C. T. U., temperance talks, political speeches, reports of conventions, eulogies of men and women, and dissertations on problems social, industrial, and sanitary. It is to be regretted that these questions are too exacting and tumultuous to be satisfactorily laid to rest. It may be that the failure to give approximate solutions is connected with the mathematical inability which troubled Miss Willard as a teacher, and which is very conspicuous in the arrangement of her book. Her logical horizon is indicated by the following estimate of "one of the kings of the nineteenth century": "Meeting the skepticism of science with its own 'scientific method,' he proves that, if a man die, he shall live again!" But it must be remembered that we are told, in the introduction to this encyclopedic volume, that it is "a home book, written for her great family circle, to be read around the evening lamp by critics who love the writer, and who want to learn from her experience how to live better and stronger lives." This indulgent jury of half a million readers will doubtless render a verdict of unanimous praise, but an even larger audience may be unexpectedly entertained by this life-story, and find it worthily called "an object-lesson in American living."

The Student's Atlas. By Richard A. Proctor. London and New York: Longmans, Green & Co. Price, $1.50.

In this little work, which was issued just before Prof. Proctor's death last year, the originality of its author is strongly evident. In most atlases, the different divisions of the earth are represented on different scales and often on different projections, so that the ideas they convey as to the shape and relative positions of the various land areas are far from correct. The oceans generally are not mapped at all, so no idea is given of the tracks of vessels across them, nor of the directions from each other of different parts of their shores. Prof. Proctor has avoided these defects in his atlas by depicting the whole surface of the globe on twelve maps, each representing the part of the surface of a sphere corresponding to one side of an inclosed dodecahedron. The maps are all on one scale and a uniform projection, and each occupies a double octavo page. There are also two index maps, which show the connection between the maps of the series. A brief description of each map is given in the introduction, and on the pages between the maps, usually left blank, Prof. Proctor gives the number and chief contents of the map on the other side of the leaf.

The Economic Basis of Protection. By Simon N. Patten, Ph. D. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Company. Pp. 144. Price, $1.

We have wondered why some adherent of protection did not get out a book of this sort; for, in view of the pronounced tendency of free-traders to base their creed on fundamental principles, the neglect of protectionists to do the same looks like a confession that protection has no principles on which to stand. But now Prof. Patten has undertaken to give briefly the reasons for the faith that is in him. He asserts that free-traders take as their ideal a society in a "static" condition, while for a society in a "dynamic" or progressive state, which is the actual condition of America, protection is the only admissible policy. He maintains that a locality should not be encouraged to devote itself to the exclusive production of the commodity which it can yield best, because the surplus must pay the cost of long transportation to a market. A variety of things should be produced, and only such quantities of each as can be consumed in the vicinity. Although not so large a gross result could be obtained in this way as by devoting the productive power of the community to a specialty, the author evidently