and weight. The appendix includes a collection of names in biography, fiction, geography, mythology, etc., with the pronunciation and definition of each, arranged in a single alphabetical list. There are also a glossary of foreign words and phrases, a list of cases of faulty diction, lists of disputed spellings and pronunciations, abbreviations, signs, and one giving the sentiments of flowers and gems. The scientific alphabet used throughout the dictionary to indicate pronunciation is explained at length in the appendix, and there is also a key showing the pronunciation of Anglo-Saxon, Latin, Greek, and thirteen modern languages with the aid of this alphabet. In the appendix, as in the body of the work, the form and arrangement of the matter have been carefully adapted to popular use. In a great many families the dictionary is the only reference book, and to these especially the Standard will prove highly satisfactory.
Dr. Judas: a Portrayal of the Opium Habit. By William Rosser Cobbe. Chicago: S. C. Griggs & Co. Pp. 320. Price, $1.50.
Nine years of dreadful experience joined to the facile diction of an able journalist are here applied to warning all who will read of the horrors of opium slavery. The author tells the story of his own subjection—vividly, impressively, fascinatingly—with incidents from the experience of others and observations on the effects of other narcotic drugs. The habit was fastened upon him from the administration of morphine during an illness by his physician. He declares that a great majority of the two million persons habitually using narcotic drugs in the United States were introduced to the habit by careless physicians, whom he censures severely. From the start he found himself compelled to deceive and lie in order to conceal the practice. For this he despised himself, and he was also in constant dread of being found out. Delusions as to hostile intentions of those about him and threatening voices haunted him. The unsettling influence of the drug caused him to endanger the support of his family several times by giving up his position. He had bewildering, grotesque, and dreadful dreams, and among his other ills were insomnia, periods of depression, and a variety of aches and pains. After many attempts to break his chains, he was cured by a treatment lasting thirty days, thus contradicting the verdict of many physicians that "the opium habit is a vice which can not be reached by medical science." The author vigorously denounces De Quincey's book, and contradicts many of its statements which are favorable to opium.
Elementary Lessons in Electricity and Magnetism. By Silvanus P. Thompson. London and New York: Macmillan & Co. Pp. 607. Price, $1.40.
This is a new and revised edition of a work which first appeared in 1881. The revision was rendered necessary by the large advances which have been made in the electrical world during the last ten years. These advances have occurred not alone in the practical electrician's department, in the way of perfecting old and creating new machinery and thus opening new fields for its application, but also in the general acceptance and extending of theories which ten years ago were mere speculations.
The most striking of the latter has been the establishment of the identity between light waves and electrical waves, a fact the probability of which Clerk Maxwell suggested many years ago, and which has since been practically established by the work of Heinrich Hertz. In view of the widespread and constantly growing uses and applications of electrical energy in the arts and in transportation, it seems quite essential that even a common-school education, to which, unfortunately, much the greater number are limited, should include such a study of electrical theory and practice as would, at any rate, teach the student the dangers and means of guarding against accident when in the neighborhood of this most subtle and silent of workers. This book, while rather more extensive than such a superficial knowledge would require, is simply and clearly written and well arranged, and, as its name implies, begins at the bottom.
The first three chapters have to do respectively with frictional electricity, current electricity, and magnetism, and together constitute Part I. Part II contains chapters on electrostatics, electro-magnetics, electricity as a heating, lighting, and motor
