teer; it contains a history of the world, a treatise on each of the arts, sciences, and professions, a history of every literature, and many other treatises which are frequently issued as separate volumes. Fifty-two textbooks now used in colleges consist of articles prepared by their authors for the Britannica. There are three divisions of the Guide. For boys and girls it has home readings in history, biography, science, and on sports and games. For the student it has courses of reading in history, language, literature, the sciences from astronomy to zoölogy, the Bible, etc. In another division it has lists of articles of interest to the merchant, the builder, the electrician, the gardener, the physician, the journalist, the miner, the home-maker, and many others. Many of the references are to the American Additions and Revisions, which the Werner Company has inserted in its edition of the Britannica.
The History of English Literature, by Prof. W. M. Nevin, is based on the conception that literature, like history in general, is an organic process or growth. It springs up out of a nation's life and is its proper expression, always modified by its racial tendencies, its degree of civilization, its climate and soil, and its relations with surrounding nations. The book is designed to furnish interesting and useful information to readers generally, as well as to students in particular. It was arranged to meet the needs of the author in lecturing to his classes, and hence ought to be of practical value to the teacher as well as the student. (Intelligencer Printing Office, Lancaster, Pa.)
The financial essays by Allen Ripley Foote, collected in the book entitled A Sound Currency and Banking System (New York, G. P. Putnam's Sons), were written with the conviction that business panics are ultimately the result of incorrect monetary education finding its expression in unsound legislation. Believing that the immediate return and continued maintenance of a high degree of prosperity for all the people are not prevented by any natural economical condition, the author seeks the appointment of a monetary commission, which, he assumes, acting discreetly, can devise a sound currency and banking system that will remove the cause of financial panics; and the purpose of his essays is to assist in securing the appointment of such a commission and help to a right understanding of the importance, aim, and direction of the work it should do.
While studying the Salishan languages of Washington and Oregon, Dr. Franz Boas learned that the dialects of the lower Chinook were on the verge of disappearing, and that some of them were remembered by only a few individuals. This fact determined him to make an effort to collect what little remained of them. With considerable difficulty he found a person who understood the Chinook, was acquainted with its stories, and intelligent enough to communicate them to him. The results of his labors are embodied in a paper on Chinook Texts, which is published with the originals and interlineal and current translations of the mythological and other stories, by the United States Bureau of Ethnology.
In the Spirit of the Papacy, J. S. Hittell examines the papacy in its political, intellectual, and ethical, as distinct from its theological, aspects. He undertakes to show by what devices it has tried to enslave the human race, and to prove that it is now dwarfing the intellects of those Catholics who submit to its control. He says that there are at present two great classes of Catholics—those including the high clergy, who resist everything in the shape of an innovation or advance; and a larger class, who have drawn near to the Protestants, and who plead for greater friendliness between the adherents of the two great branches of the Christian Church. (The author, San Francisco.)
The two great sources of difficulty to the beginner in geometry are the comparative novelty of the subject-matter and the unaccustomed clearness of conception and exactness of expression required in this new study. In Elements of Geometry, by John Macnie, edited by E. E. White (American Book Co., $1.25), the author says that the second source of difficulty is most easily diminished by reducing the first to a minimum. He has tried to present the subject of geometry with a "logical strictness approaching that of Euclid, while taking advantage of such improvements in arrangement and notation as are suggested by modern experience. . . . The function of a geometry is only secondarily the presenta-
