and assimilations should be as exact as possible, and this exactness should be rooted into habit.
1. Sense-observation. Great attention should be given to educating learners to gain exact sense-ideas through each sense. The power and accuracy of memory, imagination, and thought depend largely upon the extent and exactness of our sense-knowledge. Merchants must be able to test the quality of their goods by their senses. Mechanics, cooks, artists, poets, need to have the power of exact sense-observation well developed. Habits of exact observation should be cultivated early in life, and maintained persistently. Gazing around at everything, and listening to every sound, are not meant by this, but a careful attention to details, plans, and purposes.Large use is made of tabular statements, diagrams, and different styles of type in presenting the author's meaning. The closing portion of the work, on The Art of Teaching, consists of seven short chapters. In the second of these Prof. Baldwin states and comments upon the following "Nine Laws of Teaching": "1. Be what you would have your children become. 2. Know thoroughly the children and the subject. 3. Use easy words and apt illustrations. 4. Secure attention through interest. 5. By easy steps lead through the known to the unknown. 6. Lead learners to find out, to tell, and to do for themselves. 7. Train learners to assimilate into unity their acquisitions. 8. Train pupils to habitually do their best, in the best ways. 9. Lead the pupil through right ideas to right conduct." He then proceeds to define the fundamental teaching processes, and to state which are to be most largely employed in the several periods of education. This work, with the author's two earlier books, on the Art of School Management, and Elementary Psychology, form a series in elementary pedagogy. During the past forty years the chapters of the present volume have been given as lessons to many classes of teachers, and they are now fixed in the form in which the author believes they will be most helpful.
A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism.—By James Clerk Maxwell. Third edition. In two volumes. New York: Macmillan & Co. Price, $8.
That a work on electricity in this generation of electrical progress should still continue to be printed twenty years after it was written, and ten years after the death of its author, is an indication of sterling worth. Although a treatise like this, dealing only with the mathematics of electricity, is not so liable to become antiquated as one treating of the theories and applications of the science, yet Maxwell's book had a distinct forward trend which has contributed much to its longevity. The editor of the present edition, Prof. J. J. Thomson, says in his preface that the advances made by electricity and magnetism in the last twenty years are "in no small degree due to the views introduced into these sciences by this book; many of its paragraphs have served as the starting points of important investigations"; and further, that "all recent investigations have tended to confirm in the most remarkable way the views advanced by Maxwell." In revising this work Prof. Thomson has added foot-notes relating to isolated points which could be dealt with briefly, but the chief advances in electricity that have been made since the publication of the first edition are to be treated more consecutively in a supplementary volume. He has added some explanations to the argument in passages where he has found that students meet with difficulties. He has also attempted to verify the results that Maxwell gives without proof, and where he arrives at different results has indicated the difference in a foot-note.
Longmans' New School Atlas. Edited by George G. Chisholm and C. H. Leete. New York: Longmans, Green & Co. Price, $1.50.
There are thirty-eight maps in this atlas, most of them being on double-page sheets, measuring about fourteen by eleven inches, and a few being on longer folded sheets. Coloring and a variety of markings are used so as make to each give a remarkably full description of the lands and waters that it represents. There are seven maps of the world: the first showing the height of land and depth of sea in contours; the second showing ocean currents, periodical rains, and drainage; the third, in four parts, giving isotherms; the fourth showing the mean atmospheric pressure and prevailing winds in January and in July; the fifth, magnetic variation; the sixth, vegetation; and the seventh, in two parts, density of population, races, and religions. The maps of the several countries show political divisions (historical boundaries being
