popular history of this most ancient of nations, in the light of the latest researches. While we accept as valid the author's reason for not including the science, art, and literature, as well as the dynastic history—that the space contemplated by the plan did not admit of it—we hope that some one will do as good work for those features, and the popular life, too, of Egypt, as is done in this work for its politics and foreign relations. The material for illustrating them is abundant, and is lively, characteristic, human, and vastly fuller of interest than the long list of unpronounceable names of unknown kings, with their ascriptions of divine qualities to themselves, of which a chronicle of events must largely consist.
History and Pathology of Vaccination. By Edgar M. Crookshank, M. B. Philadelphia: P. Blakiston, Son & Co. 2 vols.
The story of the introduction of inoculation for the small-pox into England, and of its replacement by vaccination through the labors of Jenner, is fully told in these two fine volumes. It is a record which is extremely interesting and instructive to the lay reader, besides being historically valuable to the physician. The practitioner in England, where the work originated, will also find many of its facts and figures available for a practical purpose for which there is slight occasion in the United States, namely, for combating prejudice against vaccination. The first volume opens with a history of smallpox inoculation in various European and Asiatic countries and in England. Then follow the traditions, current among the dairy-maids in the last century, that persons who had taken the cow-pox from the animals were proof against the small-pox; and evidence is given to show that Benjamin Jesty, a farmer, purposely transferred the disease from a cow to his wife and his two children in 1774, thus anticipating Dr. Jenner in vaccination by over twenty years. A portrait of Jesty forms the frontispiece of the volume, and a small portrait of his wife is also given. An account of Jenner's life and his work in this field forms a large part of the volume, and contains extracts from many of his letters and essays on the subject. Successive chapters deal with various sources of vaccine lymph—namely, human small-pox, cattle-plague, sheep small-pox, goat-pox, cow-pox, and "grease" in horses. A brief account of the progress of vaccination jn England after the death of Jenner is also given. The volume is illustrated with many full-page colored plates. The second volume consists of reprints of selected essays, beginning with the first edition of Jenner's Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolæ Vaccinæ, published in 1798. It contains also essays by Pearson, Woodville, Loy, Bousquet, Ceely, and other physicians prominent in the early history of vaccination, and several others by Jenner. The author contributes to this volume a paper describing an Outbreak of Cow-pox near Cricklade (Wiltshire) in 1887.
The Psychology of Attention. By Th. Ribot. Authorized Translation. Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company. Pp. 121. Price, 75 cents.
This treatise is a clear and interesting study of the mechanism of the mental attitude that is necessary to any advance in skill or knowledge. It is founded upon the experiments and investigations of recent years, which have examined and defined the bodily manifestations accompanying the intellectual state. Heretofore many psychologists have been content to view attention from the subjective side only, and consequently have not given any comprehensible account of its genesis. M. Ribot uses the reverse method. He finds that there are two forms of attention: the primitive or natural, which he names spontaneous, exhibited by animals with only a few developed senses, and by man until training or force steps in; second, the artificial or voluntary, a cultivated product whose effects psychologists have dissected. Both forms are dependent upon emotional states, and the mechanism of each is motory, mainly in the form of inhibition or "arrested motion." The physical manifestations, the vaso-motor phenomena, the respiratory changes, the bodily expressions, and the cerebral effects, are the wheel-work of attention; and the patient investigation of these by Darwin, Riccardi, Galton, Maudsley, Preyer, and Féré, has made an explanation of its mechanism possible.
In considering the cerebral phenomena the old problem is encountered—whether
