Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 54.djvu/731

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SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE.
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Germany. Hardly any original work on wages is to be found there for half a century after the publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, although numerous textbooks bearing upon the subject were issued—all for the most part only summarizing or slightly modifying the reasonings and conclusions of the English master. The conditions of economic life in the two countries were different, and the "industrial revolution was slow in developing on the Continent, and in Germany the old industrial order with its restrictions and conservative methods prevailed long after England had replaced the old with the new." These differences between the two countries may adequately account for the great disparity in theoretic development. And Germany is still largely dependent upon other countries in its discussions. In the present work, the chief object being to discover progress of thought on the subject, chronology had to be sacrificed, in some instances, to a logical treatment. Those writers are grouped who appear to show the largest number of points of contact, and this leads to placing all the German writers treated in two groups, in one of which a real unity of method and interest prevails, and Hermann is the most important center, while the other group includes van Thünen, Karl Marx, and Schulze-Gaevemitz, authors who do not belong together in the sense that the others do.

Among the articles in the Columbia University Bulletin for June, 1898, are those on the Department of History, the Preparatory Schools (by G. R. Carpenter), Columbia NonGraduates (H. G. Paine), the Teaching of Anatomy (by George S. Huntington), and the second of Mr. H. A. Cushing's historical papers on King's College in the American Revolution.

The report of Filibert Noth, special agent of the Division of Forestry, on Forestry Conditions and Interests of Wisconsin, and the Third Annual Report of the Chief Fire Warden of Minnesota, C. C. Andrews, furnish many facts and suggestions of value to persons interested in the maintenance and protection of our forests.

D. Appleton and Company publish as one of their Home Reading Books The Story of Rob Roy, by Sir Walter Scott, condensed for home and school reading by Edith D. Harris. The editor of the series, Dr. W. T. Harris, furnishes a preface, pointing out the essential qualities of Scott's works on which their fame rests, and analyzing the features of Scottish and English life of the age to which they relate and which give these stories of the border their interest and charm. In explanation of the plan and reason of the present condensation, he says that "it has been found possible to condense the Waverley novels by omitting all lengthy descriptions of scenery, historical disquisitions on the times, and a few passages of dialogue and monologue that do not contribute directly to the progress of the story, or throw light upon the character of the persons who enter upon the scene. It is believed that by this method the interest is preserved intact, and that after a year's interval the story in its unabridged form may be read with as lively an interest as the youth will feel in reading this version." Price, 60 cents.

A paper, Indices Ponderaux de la Crane (Weight Indexes of the Brain), in the Bulletin of the Anthropological Society of Paris, comprises the results of a study of the weight and capacity of the brain, the weight of the mandible, and the cranio-mandibular and craniocerebral indices, etc., made upon sixty-four heads of animals by George Grant McCurdy, of New Haven, with the collaboration of M. Nicolas Mohyliansky.

The pamphlet embodying the Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Session of the Association of American Anatomists, held at Cornell University in December, 1897, contains a portrait and notice, with bibliography of the late Dr. Harrison Allen, the reports of the majority and the minority of the committee on anatomical nomenclature, and seventeen papers contributed by members of the association.

The University Geological Survey of Kansas is conducted under the authority of the Board of Regents of the State University, and has issued already several large and elegant volumes recording the operations and results of its work. The fourth volume, now before us, embraces the paleontology of the Upper Cretaceous, and is by Samuel W. Williston, paleontologist. Kansas is famous for its fossils, no equal area in the United