Exposition. A short article is given on mental fatigue in school. The Bertillon system as a means of suppressing the business of living by crime is explained in a chapter entitled Current Discussions. Several of the papers relate to æsthetic cultivation in connection with manual training and to decorative art; another chapter is given to art decorations in schoolrooms; and another treats as "current questions" of teachers' mutual benevolent associations and pension laws, coeducation, compulsory school attendance, transportation of children to school, and temperance instruction; and there are statistical chapters on agricultural and industrial education in the United States and other countries, education in Alaska, city school systems, commercial and business schools, professional schools, education of the colored race, schools for the defective classes, reform schools, and other schools.
The sixteenth annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, besides Mr. Powell's administrative report giving details of the work of the bureau month by month, and by departments, contains papers on Primitive Trepanning in Peru, by M. A. Muñiz and W J McGee; Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, by Cosmos Mendeleff; Day Symbols of the Maya Year, by Cyrus Thomas; and Tusayan Snake Ceremonies, by J. Walter Fewkes. We have also Dr. Thomas's Day Symbols of the Maya Year in a separate publication.
We have the first number, October, 1897, of the American Quarterly Economist, published at 15 East Eleventh Street, New York, a magazine devoted to the interests of economical science. It advances a formula for the conception of the point of equilibrium of the wages of labor which it proposes to demonstrate. This initial number has articles on A New Theory of Value and Price; Labor, its Price; and how affected by the Use of Machinery; Machinery; and Success of Nations. Pp. 31. $1 a year.
Uncle Roberts Visit is the third book in the series Uncle Robert's Geography of Appletons' Home Reading Books. This series is edited by Colonel Francis W. Parker, one of the most eminent and successful teachers in the country. He believes in putting life into the schools, and has done it wherever he has been, and designs the geography series to help teachers put life into their teaching in the primary classes. Uncle Robert comes to the farm and talks to the children, assisting them at the same time to observe and experiment, about the map of the farm, the thermometer, the animals, flowers, sunlight and shadow, barometer, woods, birds, thundershower, railroad, the rainy day, etc., and the things which these suggest and illustrate, always having the geographical bearing well in view. So far as is possible each child is left to discover facts for himself and make original inferences—an example which the teacher may follow to a reasonable extent, taking care that the child's desire for knowledge is in the end satisfied. The name of Nellie Lathrop Helm is associated with that of Dr. Parker in the authorship of the book. New York: D. Appleton & Co.
We have from the Macmillan Company the first four volumes of a series of six Science Readers for the schoolroom or the house, by Vincent T. Murché, revised and adapted by Mrs. L. L. Wilson (price, 25 and 40 cents each). They are intended to be used as reading books or text-books or as the bases of object lessons in the secondary and grammar grades, and the teacher is expected to illustrate them by object exhibitions and experiments before giving them to the children. The lessons are consecutive in groups of which the members depend severally upon the preceding one, and concern tl;e properties of bodies; the nature, growth, and structure of plants; the common types of animals; minerals and metals; the phenomena of the weather; and, generally, the conditions around us.
The Open Court Company, Chicago, publish a second edition of the Popular Scientific Lectures of Dr. Ernst Mach, revised and enlarged. The additions consist of the author's Vienna inaugural lecture on The Part played by Accident in Invention and Discovery, a lecture on the Sensations of Orientation, and two historical articles on Acoustics and Sight. The lectures are of the highest order, as to both matter and manner, thoroughly scientific and adapted to popular understanding. One of the purposes which the author seeks to carry out in
