of finding oil and gas in paying quantities within the limits of the State and the districts in which searching for them will be most hopeful. He believes that the accumulation of oil is connected with certain uplifts of the strata indicating faults, and points out certain lines of such dislocations as regions in which the discovery of oil or gas is more or less probable.
Proceedings and Transactions of the Scientific Association. Meriden, Conn. 1885-'86. Charles H. S. Davis, M. D., Secretary. Pp. 64.
The Association, at the beginning of its sixth year, had one hundred and thirty members. Nine papers were read before it in 1885 and eight in 1886; an excursion was made to the Portland quarries; and among the lecturers in 1886-'87 were Alfred Russel Wallace and Professor Alexander Winchell. The volume of the Transactions contains an account of the Catopterus gracilis, a fossil fish found at Little Falls, by Dr. Davis; a study of "the Hanging Hills," as the trap ridge at Meriden is called, by J. H. Chapin, D. D.; "A Notice of Certain Fossil Plants in the Quarries at Durham"; "A List of the Birds of Meriden," by Franklin Platt; "Additional Plants found growing at Meriden," by Mrs. C. B. Kendrick; and a poem on "West Peak, and what it saith," by the Rev. J. T. Pettes.
A Century of Electricity. By T. C. Mendenhall. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. Pp. 229. Price, $1.25.
In this book Professor Mendenhall has presented within a small compass an account free from technicalities, of the growth of the world's knowledge of electricity and its applications. The frictional electric machine, the Leyden-jar, and Franklin's lightning-rod, represented about all that was known concerning electricity in 1786, when Galvani turned a gastronomic delicacy to account as an instrument for scientific research. Volta's invention of the battery, or "pile," followed within the next decade, and made possible the rapid progress in electrical discovery which followed. Nicholson, Carlisle, Davy, Wollaston, and Daniell, are some of the prominent names of the next few years.
In 1820, Oersted, the son of a Danish apothecary, who had become Professor of Physics in the University of Copenhagen, discovered the action of a current of electricity on a suspended magnetic needle. Within one week after hearing of Oersted's discovery, Ampère had worked out the fundamental principles on which rests the whole science of electro-dynamics. The credit of discovering that electro-magnets of great power may be made by winding the core with many turns of insulated wire, belongs to an American—Joseph Henry—and the telegraph was first made a permanent commercial success by another American—Professor Morse—although various forms of the needle-telegraph had appeared in Russia, Germany, and England.
Multiplex telegraphy and the use of submarine cables are extensions which followed in due time. With the discoveries of Galvani and Oersted must be ranked another, by Faraday, on which rest "nearly all the more recent and more striking applications of the electric current." This was the discovery of electro-magnetic induction. The dynamo-electric machine, and with it the commercial use of the electric light, were thus made possible. The discovery that the dynamo is reversible, i.e., that it will run as a motor if a current is supplied, opened the way for the next great step, hardly yet consummated, the electric transmission of force. Meanwhile electricity had been set at work in the domain of acoustics also, and that wonderful invention, the telephone, was produced. The development of electrical storage, and the direct production of electricity from heat, belong rather to the coming than to the completed "Century of Electricity."
The Story of Ancient Egypt. By George Rawlinson, with the Collaboration of Arthur Gilman. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 408. Price, $1.50.
The history of this most ancient of the empires of the earth, with its old and advanced civilization, is here told in a connected, current manner, more satisfactorily than in any other book for popular reading with which we are acquainted. The history of Egypt is in fact hard to present acceptably to the general public. The ancient writers upon whom we once depended were inadequate and contradictory. The modern sources the recovered monuments and in-
