deny that the "reserve" at any period of the policy's existence can be easily ascertained. But the "reserve" is made up of one part of the premiums, and, if this part can be ascertained, why cannot the "insurance value," which is made up of the other part of the premiums, be also ascertained? It is unnecessary to know any other factors than these, to be able to determine the amount of the "surrender value." The latter factor forms the basis of the "surrender charge," which may be eight per cent, of it, and the "surrender charge" deducted from the former leaves the "surrender value."
We have thus endeavored to give a brief outline of the main feature of Mr. Wright's book; the others are chiefly incidental to the illustration of this one. The glimpses occasionally given of the manner in which matters are conducted beneath the surface of life insurance are not calculated to leave on the reader's mind a favorable impression of at least one or two of the actors. In this connection, however, the tone of the writer is not always as dignified as it might be. The chapter at the end of the book, on the relation between currency and life insurance, exhibits some sound financial views. The book aims a vigorous blow in defense of the people, and it is to be hoped that its effect will be decisive.
Contributions to Solar Physics. By J. Norman Lockyer, F. R. S. New York: Macmillan & Co. 1874. 676 pages. Price, $10.
The avidity of the general public for information in regard to recent researches in physics, and particularly in regard to researches made by aid of the spectroscope, is witnessed by the number of volumes which have appeared within the past few years devoted solely to the popular exposition of these subjects. The announcement of a new book with the same purpose is one which, we should fancy, the average reader of these books would receive with mingled feelings. It seems to us that this average reader, while feeling that it was his duty to rejoice that the class which he represents was being so very fully supplied with treatises on a certain class of topics, would likewise begin to doubt whether the topics themselves had not been exhausted.
At least, he might doubt whether the popular exposition of them had not been carried to an extreme point. Certainly it seems very hard to add to the books of Roscoe and Schellen any thing in regard to the fundamentals of Spectrum Analysis, which shall be worth adding. It is easy to conceive our average reader turning the pages of a new book of this sort with a kind of nervous fear, lest he should come across those tiresome wood-cuts of a German-looking man gazing intently into a prism in the hope of seeing a candle-flame double, or of two sombre individuals shut up in a dark and very large room, alone with Newton's experiment. These woodcuts he has seen for years, and they seem to him as the brown-stone houses on the Fifth Avenue seem to the weary traveler; mile-stones that he can never pass—"a procession which never gets past its given point."
Now, we distinctly sympathize with our average reader, and we claim that a book of this nature, to be necessary or even acceptable at this time, must be a decided step in advance of the former ones.
The volume before us contains 676 pages (including a good Index), and it is divided into two parts: Part I. is devoted to a popular account of ancient and modern Sun-work; Part II. contains communications made by the author to the Royal Society of London, and to the French Academy of Sciences. Added to these we have sixteen valuable Notes on various special points; and two Appendices, one giving the "Instructions to Observers of the Eclipse of 1871," and the other being Respighi's "Memoir on Solar Prominences."
To consider the volume in inverse order, we may say that, of Part II., the valuable Notes and Appendices are the only parts which ought to have been given in their present form, according to our judgment, and it may even be doubted whether the Notes should not have been worked into the text. Mr. Lockyer says, in regard to the contributions to the Royal Society and to the Academy of Sciences, that they are "of course" given verbatim. Here the author has, it seems to us, forgotten the
