440 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



gineering News from 1890 to 1899' has 

 just been issued, which supplies the 

 want as far as the files of that journal 

 for those years is concerned. This is a 

 volume of three hundred and twenty- 

 four pages, alphabetically arranged after 

 the manner of a subject catalogue; it is 

 an excellent example of good indexing, 

 which may profitably be followed by 

 other periodicals with advantage to 

 themselves and their readers. 



'Water Power,' by Joseph P. 

 Frizell, published by Wiley & Sons, is 

 the first engineering book to bear the 

 date of the twentieth century. It is a 

 book for the practitioner rather than 

 for the student, practical rather than 

 theoretical, descriptive rather than ar- 

 gumentative. Of the five hundred and 

 sixty pages, about two hundred are de- 

 voted to dams, about one hundred and 

 fifty to canals and water wheels, and 

 the remainder to the construction of 

 power plants and the transmission of 

 power. Much of the extended experi- 

 ence of the author is here recorded in 

 a form which is likely to be useful to 

 the enginering profession, and it is cer- 

 tain that as the coal deposits become 

 exhausted the energy of waterfalls 

 must more and more be utilized. It was 

 a marked characteristic of the engineer- 

 ing books of the nineteenth century that 

 they were adapted for the use both of 

 students and practitioners, the same 

 works that were studied in the class- 

 room being the manuals for field and 

 office work. There now seems to be a 

 tendency to issue books, embodying the 

 experience of engineers, which are main- 

 ly useful in practise and which are 

 needed in engineering colleges only for 

 consultation. One reason for this is that 

 the number of engineers is now so great 

 that such books can be published with 

 profit, and another is that many details 

 of practise have become so systematized 

 that scientific classification of them is 

 now possible. The economic side of en- 

 gineering practise has, in fact, become 

 •of utmost importance, and the multipli- 

 cation of books and periodicals is neces- 



sary in order that each designer may 

 see the good points of the designs of 

 others, avoid their faults, and thus make 

 his own construction of greatest sta- 

 bility and usefulness at the minimum 

 cost. 



MYCOLOGY. 

 A book on 'Edible and Poisonous 

 Mushrooms,' by Prof. George F. Atkin- 

 son, of Cornell University, has been 

 published by Andrus & Church, Ithaca, 

 N. Y. The author's 'Studies and Illus- 

 trations of Mushrooms,' issued as Bul- 

 letins 138 and 168 of the Cornell Uni- 

 versity Agricultural Experiment Sta- 

 tion, have been so well received, and 

 there has been such a demand for lit- 

 erature on the subject, that he pre- 

 pared this large octavo book, contain- 

 ing over two hundred half-tone illustra- 

 tions. Of these, seventy are used 

 as full-page plates, and there are, be- 

 sides, fifteen species in color. Nearly all 

 the genera of North American agarics 

 are illustrated, and many of the im- 

 portant genera, such as Amanita, Agari- 

 cus (Psalliota), Lepiota, Mycena, Pas- 

 illus, etc., have a number of illustra- 

 tions, while the genus Amanita, contain- 

 ing several of the most poisonous spe- 

 cies, represented by about fifteen species, 

 fully illustrated with the development 

 and differential characters, described 

 at length. In all, about two hundred 

 species are described, and more than 

 three hundred names are accounted for. 

 Mrs. Sarah Tyson Rorer writes a special 

 chapter on recipes for cooking mush- 

 rooms, and Mr. J. F. Clark one on the 

 chemistry, toxicology and food value of 

 mushrooms. There are also chapters on 

 the collection and preservation of mush- 

 rooms, how to avoid the poisonous ones,- 

 and keys to the genera of the agarics. 



FOLK-LORE. 



In the 'History of the Devil and the 

 Idea of Evil from the Earliest Times to 

 the Present Day' (The Open Court Pub- 

 lishing Company), Dr. Paul Carus has 

 produced an interesting and a convenient 

 manual of a certain aspect of the an- 



