134 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Moral and Religious Aspects of Herbert 

 Spencer's Philosophy are presented in a 

 paper by Sylvan Drey, under three heads: 

 First, Spencer's theory of religion; second, 

 Spencer's theory of morality ; third, the re- 

 lation of religion to morality from the Spen- 

 cerian point of view. The object of the 

 essay is exposition and not defense, and the 

 author has the happy faculty of clear state- 

 ment, which such work requires. In a lect- 

 ure on Primitive Man, Z. Sidney Sampson 

 sketches the life-record of man as it is re- 

 vealed to us by the flint implements belong- 

 ing to the Pleistocene and possibly to earlier 

 geologic periods, by the articles found among 

 the piles in the Swiss lakes, etc. The lect- 

 ure is devoted mostly to the discoveries and 

 conclusions relating to the earlier Old and 

 New Stone Periods. C. Staniland Wake de- 

 scribes The Growth of the Marriage Rela- 

 tion, giving the attitude of primitive peoples 

 toward consanguineous marriage, some of 

 the varieties of polygyny and of polyandry 

 that have obtained in various countries, and 

 the chief features in the growth of monog- 

 amy. 



Two successive volumes of the Questions 

 of the bay series are devoted to " the rail- 

 way problem." One of these, by Hon. W. 

 D. Dabney, is entitled The Public Regulation 

 of Railways (Putnams, $1.25). It deals 

 with the commercial relations of the rail- 

 ways to the public, and does not take up the 

 regulation of the roads with reference to 

 safety and convenience. The author dis- 

 cusses first the legal aspects of the ques- 

 tion and then its economic aspects. Un- 

 der the former head are considered the 

 sources of legislative power over railroads, 

 and the limitations of this power arising 

 from charter contracts, from the property 

 rights of the owners of railways, and from 

 the powers of Congress over interstate 

 commerce. On these subjects, the decisions 

 of the United States Supreme Court are 

 taken as authority almost exclusively. On 

 the economic side the discussion is based 

 principally upon material contained in the 

 reports and decisions of the Interstate Com- 

 merce Commission, and in the testimony and 

 arguments presented to that body in the re- 

 port made and testimony taken by the 

 "Cullom Committee" of the Senate, and 

 various other reports. The closing chapters 



contain a brief analysis of the Interstate 

 Commerce Act, and a consideration of the 

 relations of the express companies to the 

 railways and to the people. 



The phase of the subject dealt with by 

 Mr. John M. Bonham concerns Railway Se- 

 crecy and Trusts (Putnams, $1.25). The 

 secret discounts that railways make to cer- 

 tain monopolistic manufacturing corporations 

 the author regards as the most serious feat- 

 ure of the railway problem. In his discus- 

 sion of the subject he traces the growth of 

 abuses in railroad management, showing 

 that they owe their existence to the faulty 

 system under which railroad charters have 

 been granted. He states that the commis- 

 sions that have been appointed to regulate 

 great trusts and corporations fail to accom- 

 plish any reform because they have not the 

 power to get at the secret agreements of 

 these bodies, and he recommends a system 

 of inspection which will prevent the unjust 

 favoritism complained of. 



The Report of the Commissioner of Edu- 

 cation for 1887-88 is about as late in ap- 

 pearing as that of the preceding year, 

 although it was completed three months 

 earlier. The efforts and appeals of Com- 

 missioner Dawson for prompt publication of 

 this document should meet with better suc- 

 cess. Among the topics that receive special 

 attention in the report are the condition and 

 needs of education among the thousand 

 Metlakahtla Indians, who have recently re- 

 moved from British Columbia to an island 

 near Sitka, also among the other inhabitants 

 of Alaska. Manual training, industrial in- 

 struction, and education at the South, are 

 also carefully reviewed. 



A course of lectures on the Constitutional 

 History of the United States, as seen in the 

 Development of American Laiv (Putnams, $2), 

 delivered at the University of Michigan, has 

 been published in book form. The subjects 

 and lecturers are as follows : The Federal 

 Supreme Court : its Place in the American 

 Constitutional System, by Judge Thomas M. 

 Cooley; Constitutional Development in the 

 United States as influenced by Chief-Justice 

 Marshall, by Hon. Henry Hitchcock ; as influ- 

 enced by Chief -Justice Taney, by Hon. George 

 W. Biddle ; as influenced by the Decisions 

 of the Supreme Court since 1865, by Prof. 

 Charles A. Kent ; and The State Judiciary : 



