gift a large number of stuffed animals from the Boston Museum collection. Some of these had been formerly in the famous Peale Museum in Philadelphia. The work of a guide in explaining the society's collections to visitors was continued through the year by the liberality of a Boston lady. An arrangement was made with the Boston Normal School whereby the resources of the society were employed to aid in the training of teachers of science. Other evidences of activity are reported.
The numbers of the Journal of the College of Science, Imperial University, Japan, as they come to us, bear continuous evidence of the original work that is done in scientific investigation by Japanese students. The latest three are Vol. VII, Part II, On the After Shocks of Earthquakes, by F. Omori, a careful study, with elaborate tables and sixteen plates and charts; Vol. VIT, Part III, Mesozoic Plants from Kōzuke, Kii, Awa, and Tosa, by Matajiro Yokoyama, Professor of Paleontology, with ten plates; and Vol. VIII, Part I, Studies on the Ectoparasitic Trematodes of Japan, by Seitaro Goto, of the Science College, with twenty-nine plates. The last two papers include full and definite descriptions of species.
A curious insight is given into the mythologies and modes of thought of some of our Indian tribes by the study of Mr. J. Walter Fewkes of The Walpi Flute Observance. This primitive drama, as we gather from Mr. Fewkes's concluding paragraphs, is performed on alternate years with the "snake" ceremonials, to celebrate the coming, in the early times, of the Horn or Flute people to Walpi, where the Bear people and the Snake people were living, and their reception by them. The ceremony illustrates the permanence and the significance of the mythologies and the rituals of primitive peoples, which are incomprehensible to our ordinary knowledge. The ritual is not to these peoples, Mr. Fewkes says, a series of meaningless acts, performed haphazard and without unity, varying in successive performances, but is fixed by immutably prescribed laws which allow only limited variations. Throughout the Flute ceremony there is the same rigid adherence to prescribed usages which exists in other rites, and there is the same precision year after year in the sequence of the various episodes. The observance is celebrated by a special fraternity, of which, as well as of the ceremonies, carefully detailed descriptions are given.
In The World's Great Farm (Macmillan & Co., New York) an attempt is made by Selina Gay to set forth and illustrate the economy of Nature. The world and all that is upon it are regarded as a vast farm, its tillers and its crops; and the purpose of the book is to tell what these crops are and how they are grown. First is the tilling, which is done by the pioneer laborers, the gases of air and water breaking up the rocks; the soil-makers—cryptogamic vegetation of lichens and mosses pulverizing the rock fragments and preparing them for the more dainty vegetation; soil-carriers—the winds and the waters; the field laborers—burrowing animals, from the earthworm up; the office of water as a factor in vegetable growth, the roots and the food drawing from the soil; leaves absorbing nourishment from the air; the blossom and seed and the various agencies employed in the fertilization of flowers, and to secure the scattering of the seed; the chances of life of the plant and the way they are guarded; the friends and foes of the Nature farmer and the militia by which the foes are—kept down; and "Man's Work on the Farm" the purpose being kept in view throughout, as Prof. G. S. Boulger says in the preface, to give an account which, while simple enough to be understood by unscientific readers, and so accurate as to teach nothing that will afterward have to be unlearned, shall also be extremely attractive in the selection and marshaling of facts.
A very favorable impression is made upon us by the Popular Scientific Lectures of Prof. Ernst Mach, of the University of Prague, of which a translation authorized, revised, and commended by the author, by Thomas J. McCormack, is published by the Open Court Publishing Company, Chicago. The lectures were delivered between 1864 and 1894, at Prague and Gratz, and were intended to give the public an intelligent comprehension of the nature of scientific work in the lines covered by them, and enlist their sympathy with it. The most of them are very lucid explanations of facts and phenomena concerning which the people are inquiring, while the last four are of a
