Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 42.djvu/144

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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

tant subject of dynamics, of which the illustrations are profuse and varied. At the end of each chapter there are well-planned questions designed to test the originality and thought of the beginner, and throughout the book many problems, carefully selected, add to its value.

Six Books of the Æneid of Vergil. By William R. Harper, Ph.D., President of the University of Chicago, and Frank J. Miller, Ph. D., Instructor in Latin in the University of Chicago. American Book Company: New York, Cincinnati, Chicago. Pp. 461. Price, $1.25.

This is a school edition of the great Mantuan bard, prepared with judicious zeal and with the intention of exciting in the youthful student of Latin poetry a genuine love for the most eminent poet of ancient Rome. The bibliography is a unique but complete feature, and exceedingly well arranged. The extracts from ancient and modern poets are quite extensive for so small a text-book. There are eleven full-page photographic illustrations, all from such historic pictures as The Death of Laocoön, Ceres, The Cumæan Sibyl, etc., with Raphael's portrait of Vergil, and a map of the scene of the hero's wanderings on land and sea. The Topics for Investigation, the Testimonies to Vergil's Worth as a Poet, and the Inductive Studies, copied and condensed from the best classical commentators, form a particularly interesting feature of the book.

A copious Vergilian vocabulary, word-list, and concise foot-notes, giving instances of paraphrases of Vergilian lines in modern poets, add to the vivid character of the book and render attractive the lines of the poet, who is ever young because ever studied and always admired. Among the many editions of Vergil, we know of none in size, illustrations, type, scholarship, scope and quality of the work done, more suitable to be put into the hands of the young American student. Those of us who remember the old texts, scant notes (none plain), and who recall the beauties to be discovered without help or hint, and who were expected to discourse on grammatical puzzles like German scholiasts, can well understand why the present generation ought to read more Latin poetry in less time, understand it better, and enjoy it more than the students of thirty years ago. Even Tennyson's stately tribute on the nineteenth centenary of Vergil's death finds here an appropriate place:

"Light among the vanished ages; star that gildest yet this phantom shore;


*****
I salute thee, Mantovano, I that loved thee since my day began,

Wielder of the stateliest measure ever molded by the lips of man."

The High-school Algebra. American Book Company. Pp. 360. Price, $1.

This is a revised and enlarged edition of Prof. Milne's Inductive Algebra, already well known as a clear and widely used work. The present edition is prepared to meet the want of the improved method of teaching, and to keep pace with the advanced work demanded for high schools and advanced standing in colleges. Besides the chapters on Radical Quantities, Radical Equations, and Quadratic Equations, there are a general review and special chapters on Imaginary Quautities, Indeterminate Equations, Inequalities, Logarithms, the Binomial Theorem, Undetermined Coefficients, and the Theory and Transformation of Equations, which many of our modern algebras for schools seem to have lost sight of or completely ignore.

Pauperism: A Picture, and the Endowment of Old Age. An Argument by Charles Booth. London and New York: Macmillan & Co., 1892.

In studying some records, kept for thirteen years, of poverty at Stepney in 1880, Mr. Booth came across written records of parochial relief, and from them he draws these pictures of pauperism as seen in certain portions of London, notably at Stepney and St. Pancras, and incidentally discusses one phase of English pauperism, viz., Old Age and its Remedies. The book is one of social science study, filled with statistics, personal data, and an account of the causes usually assigned for pauperism—crime, drink, extravagance, sickness, lack of employment, miserable surroundings, vice and criminality, laziness, early marriages and large families, death of parents, old age.

Stripped of a mass of unnecessary statistics, the pith of the book occupies eight pages, Chapter VII, in which the particular phase of old age pauperism, according to Mr. Booth, is not desirably treated in England.