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Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/139

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LITERARY NOTICES.
129

book, in which Pestalozzi gives the history and circumstances that led him to those principles which he first definitely stated in the Method. These three essays form a complete group, and are estimated as Pestalozzi's most important educational works.

Woolen Spinning. By Charles Vickerman. New York: Macmillan & Co. Pp. 352.

This work is designed to be a text-book for students in technical schools and colleges, and for skillful practical men in woolen mills, which the author believes has long been wanted. The want is accentuated by the retrograde position into which the woolen industry has drifted during late years. The object of the book is to restate the principles that underlie the various processes and operations of the earlier portions of the woolen manufacture, and to assert their importance from the nature of the material in its raw state onward through every operation up to its being ready for the loom. The special subjects are considered of the nature and qualities of wool, sources of supply, sorting, scouring and drying, bleaching and extracting, dyeing, teasing or willeying, burring, mixing, oiling, carding; spinning, its history, principles, and progress; and the self-actor mule. The text is made clearer by the aid of numerous illustrations.

Bible, Science and Faith. By the Rev. J. A. Zahm. Baltimore: John Murphy & Co. Pp. 316. Price, $1.25.

The purpose of this book is to discuss the relationship between religion and science, and to prove that there is no antagonism between the truths of the Bible and the truths of Nature as revealed by scientific research. Some of the topics treated were presented before the Catholic summer school in 1893, and excited much interest and discussion. The author recognizes that a more extensive acquaintance with the natural and physical sciences, and the accumulation by Egyptologists and Assyriologists of new historical facts of far-reaching importance, have thrown much light on many parts of the Bible that were previously ill understood, if at all, and have supplied us with the necessary data for the solution of numerous perplexing problems-which before were regarded as inexplicable mysteries. The notion is contradicted that reliance upon the Bible as a divinely inspired book should interfere with the freedom of investigation any more than reliance upon the compass or lighthouses should cripple the mariner's freedom of sailing. The truths of faith and the truths of science, though belonging to different categories, can never come into conflict. Both have God for their author. Guided by these views, the author discusses the Mosaic Hexaemeron in the Light of Exegesis and Modern Science (showing in the discussion how St. Gregory of Nyssa foreshadowed the nebular hypothesis and St. Augustine was an evolutionist); the Noachian Deluge, particularly with reference to its geographical, zoölogical, and anthropological universality; and the Age of the Human Race according to Modern Science and Biblical Chronology.

The Natural Law of Money. By William Brough. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 168. Price, $1.

In this work the successive steps in the growth of money are traced from the days of barter to the introduction of the modern clearing house, and monetary principles are examined in their relation to present and past legislation. It is shown in the beginning that money came into use on account of its inherent fitness for certain services and men's appreciation of its value for such services before laws were made for its regulation and independently of laws. This argument is further developed to show that legal regulation can not, does not, and never did give value to money or affect it in any way save that unwise enactments may limit its elasticity and usefulness. "Clearly there is no need of making coin a legal tender at any weight whatever. If governments would confine their legislation to fixing by enactment the fineness of the precious metal and the number of grains that shall constitute each piece of a given size, they may safely leave the maintenance of the coinage in its integrity and the value of the pieces to be regulated by individual interest and action. Practically this point of monetary advancement has been reached by most of the civilized nations; but in the useless, although comparatively harmless, act of decreeing that coin shall be a legal tender at its bullion worth is manifested the extreme conservatism