74 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



them in good condition after their installa- 

 tion in the museum. A few pages are then 

 given to an explanation of the plan of the 

 work. One of the many valuable features 

 of the book is a color chart containing thirty 

 different color combinations. 



The remaining three hundred and sixty 

 pages are occupied by the descriptive matter. 

 The distinguishing characteristics of each 

 order are first considered, including cuts of 

 both bill and foot when necessary. Then 

 the families and their individuals are studied. 

 The technical description is, in most cases, 

 followed by some observations on the origin 

 of the bird's common name, on a curious 

 habit which it may have, or other interest- 

 ing facts, from the pen of some careful ob- 

 server in the regions where this particular 

 specimen abounds. There are a number of 

 very pretty full-page illustrations. The book 

 is tastefully and strongly bound, and may 

 readily be carried in the pocket of a fishing 

 or hunting coat. 



Thinking, Feeling, Doing. By E. W. Scrip- 

 tore, Ph. D. (Leipsic). Meadville, Pa. : 

 Flood & Vincent. Pp.304. Price, $1.50. 



In this volume the director of the psy- 

 chological laboratory in Yale University sets 

 forth the methods of what may be called the 

 new psychology " a psychology of fact," as 

 he terms it, " a science of direct investiga- 

 tion of our thinking, feeling, and doing." He 

 gives twenty chapters of directions for labo- 

 ratory tests of reaction-time and thinking- 

 time, steadiness, attention, power of discrimi- 

 nation by the senses, emotion, memory, etc., 

 most of them requiring apparatus of more or 

 less complex construction. The author af- 

 fects no occult profundity in this work. His 

 style is popular and the illustrations that he 

 uses to bring home the nature of the several 

 faculties to the student or reader are drawn 

 from everyday life or well-known occur- 

 rences. Thus he begins the chapter on at- 

 tention by declaring frankly that he can not 

 tell what attention is. He proceeds to illus- 

 trate the process by describing the image 

 thrown by a camera, in which the object in 

 focus is distinctly seen while surrounding ob- 

 jects appear in successively greater degrees 

 of dimness according to their distances from 

 the focus. He then describes experiments 

 which consist in showing pictures, letters, 



words, etc., to the observer for a brief time, 

 and from which it haa been learned that four 

 or five such objects can be grasped at the 

 same time. The following extract from his 

 statement of the methods of forcing atten- 

 tion to an object will serve as a sample of his 

 mode of treatment : 



The first law I shall state is : Bigness regulates 

 the force of attention. Young children are at- 

 tracted to objects by their bigness. Advertisers 

 make it a business to study the laws of attention. 

 American advertisers in the past and also largely 

 in the present rely chiefly on the lavv of bigness. 

 They know that one large advertisement is worth 

 a multitude of small ones. A certain New York 

 life-insurance company puts up the biggest build- 

 ing, the New York World builds the highest 

 tower. Churches frequently vie in building not 

 the most beautiful but the largest house of wor- 

 ship. . . . Bigness, however, costs. The art of 

 successfully applying this law of bigness lies in 

 finding the point at which any increase or any 

 decrease in size lessens the pn fit. 



Four other laws are stated and exempli- 

 fied in similar manner, and the discussions 

 of other topics and directions for experi- 

 ments are quite as lively and simple in lan- 

 guage as the foregoing. In the two con- 

 cluding chapters the ways in which the new 

 psychology differs from both materialism 

 and spiritualism are pointed out and some 

 account is given of the labors that have most 

 contributed to its rise, with portraits of Her- 

 bart, Fechner, Helmholtz, and Wundt. There 

 are over two hundred other illustrations 

 showing apparatus, persons, and animals be- 

 ing experimented upon, diagrammatic rec- 

 ords, etc. 



The Source and Mode op Solar Energy. 

 By I. W. Heysinger, M. A., M. D. Phila- 

 delphia : J. B. Lippincott Company. Pp. 

 363. 



The author takes as his guiding princi- 

 ple the theory that the true source of solar 

 energy is not to be found in the sun itself, 

 but in the potential energy of space, and 

 that this energy is transmitted to the sun in 

 the shape of electric currents of inconceiv- 

 ably high potential generated by the move- 

 ments of the planetary system, which is real- 

 ly a huge induction machine. " All planetary 

 space," he says, "is pervaded with attenu- 

 ated vapors or gases, among which aqueous 

 vapor occupies a leading place. The planets 

 and all planetary bodies having opposite 

 electrical polarity from the central and rela- 



