1850. The work closes with the decline of the romantic movement, leaving the naturalism of the present rather a subject for current criticism. Provencal literature is not included. The index is commendably full.
The Bibliography of Education[1] is the outgrowth of an educational library which the author, Will S. Monroe, of the State Normal School, Westfield, Mass., has been collecting for sixteen years. When, a few years ago, he undertook to catalogue the collection, then numbering about twelve hundred volumes and pamphlets, with a view to publication for the benefit of other persons engaged in educational work, it was thought best to enlarge the list and include other works bearing on the subject. The present catalogue, the resultant of this idea, contains the titles of thirty-two hundred books and pamphlets, nearly all in the English language and obtainable in the ordinary course of trade. The exceptions to this rule are works of reference—encyclopædias and bibliographies, which are also included. The standard foreign works of reference are given, and sources of information are indicated respecting the educational literature of France and Germany. As much care has been taken to secure titles of English books as of American. The indexing of periodical literature is not attempted. The titles are grouped into classes, and these broken into sections and subsections, the shape of which has been largely controlled by the nature of the materials, and an index of twenty pages is provided.
Prof. Sylvanus P. Thompson's Light Visible and Invisible[2] is a work of real popular interest, and at the same time presents in its appendices to chapters brief discussions in exact science. It embodies the Christmas lectures delivered by the author to the people at the Royal Institution in 1896, which were liberally supplemented by experiments, and in which pains were taken to present the most recent progress in science. The wave theory is kept in special prominence, and the language is adapted to it. In the lecture relating to the invisible light of the infra red some of the experimental points in which the demonstration of the electro-magnetic nature of light rests are introduced. Having learned by his experience that polarization is not hard to understand when properly explained, the author has presented the subject "in a model way, devoid of pedantic terms, and illustrated by appropriate models." The topics treated are light and shadow, the visible spectrum, and the eye, polarization, the invisible spectrum of the ultra-violet and the infra-red, and Röntgen light. Interference and diffraction are barely alluded to, and spectrum analysis and the greater part of the subject of color vision are necessarily omitted. In the appendices to chapters the general method of geometrical optics, anomalous refraction and dispersion, the elastic solid, and the electromagnetic theories of light are briefly explained, and "other kinds of invisible light" are described or mentioned.
To the man who speculates on the origin and ultimate goal of the human race—and who of us does not?—the geological periods when we first begin to find evidence of man's existence in anything like his present form can not fail to be of exceeding interest. The treatment which the human society of these remote days usually receives is not of a popular character, although it is frequently closely allied to pure fiction. But now Mr. Stanley Waterloo has given us a novel[3] whose plot is laid in the time of the cave men, the earliest period from which any human remains have been obtained. The hero of the story, Ab, is one of the "great men" of his time, and the story is chiefly a history of his career. We are first introduced to him at the age of one year, the opening incident of the story recounting his narrow escape from the maw of a cave hyena, a beast which in those days was large and dangerous and a great contrast in all ways to his modern representative. The father and mother of Ab are carefully described, as well as the cave in which the family live. The cave man's probable daily life (which consisted principally of getting
- ↑ Bibliography of Education. By Will S. Monroe. New York: D. Appleton and Company. (International Education Series.) Pp. 202.
- ↑ Light Visible and Invisible. A Series of Lectures delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, at Christmas, 1896. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 294. Price, $1.50.
- ↑ The Story of Ab. By Stanley Waterloo. Chicago: Way & Williams. Pp. 351. Price, $1.50.
