9° 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



examined his passports. 'There isn't 

 any Cademie, no Cad6mie at all,' blurts 

 out the surly guard; 'all the world's 

 equal. You come along with us!' 



To the American scientist, educator 

 or promoter of foreign trade, however, 

 the chief interest in the work lies in 

 the story it tells of the adoption of the 

 system by most of the non-English- 

 speaking countries of the world. The 

 common objections of those who have 

 given the subject little thought, objec- 

 tions to nomenclature, to the magni- 

 tude of the units, to the difficulty of 

 educating the people, to the error in 

 the meter, objections which have been 

 so thoroughly considered in the cen- 

 tury past and in so many countries, 

 and which have proved of so little con- 

 sequence — these are considered fully 

 and judiciously. It will be unfortu- 

 nate if some of the societies interested 

 in the progress of the system do not 

 arrange for translating the entire 

 work, both for the enlightenment of 

 those who have given the subject little 

 attention and for the help of those who 

 believe that America can no longer 

 afford to stand out against a system 

 which the great majority of civilized 

 nations are using. 



BOOKS ON NATURE STUDY. 

 'The Sea-beach at Ebb-thje,' by 

 Augusta Foote Arnold (The Century 

 Co. ) , meets a well-defined need for 

 popular accounts of the natural his- 

 tory of the seaside. It describes the 

 animal and plant life found on the 

 beach and rocks between tide marks 

 and washed up after storms. There 

 are chapters on the distribution of ani- 

 mals and plants, on methods of collect- 

 ing and preservation, on classification 

 and on various peculiarities of certain 

 groups. Then follows an account of 

 the marine algae and marine inverte- 

 brates, systematically arranged with 

 the formality of a manual. This por- 

 tion of the book is abundantly illus- 

 trated with photographic reproduc- 

 tions. Some of these are very good. 



but many are not as clear as could be 

 wished and do not compare favorably 

 with the beautiful book work exhibited 

 in some of the recent popular accounts 

 of flowering plants. That the book is 

 far from being strictly accurate be- 

 comes apparent to any one who critic- 

 ally examines the treatment of groups 

 with which he is familiar. Neverthe- 

 less the conspicuous forms are in the 

 main sufficiently described and, what is 

 more important, so figured that the 

 tyro will have little difficulty in identi- 

 fying specimens at hand. There is 

 sure to be much confusion, however, of 

 the more minute types such as the 

 hydroids with the delicate filamentous 

 seaweeds that should be studied with 

 the compound microscope. 



The author's attitude towards classi- 

 fication seems strained. The account 

 of every large group is prefaced by a 

 table of the families, genera and species 

 to be considered. These synopses re- 

 mind one of the outlines found in dic- 

 tionaries and are very far from the 

 spirit of classification that now domi- 

 nates natural history. Such arrange- 

 ments have but small and passing 

 value in the constantly shifting scenes 

 of systematic zoology and botany. 

 Emphasis laid upon classification 

 throws into the background the wealth 

 of interest in the life and habits of 

 oiganisms which we term their natural 

 history. But a more important criti- 

 cism is the loose and inaccurate con- 

 ception of the significance and use of 

 nomenclature. When the author says 

 that specific names are 'occasionally 

 the names of botanists who first de- 

 scribed the plants' (p. 29), she shows 

 much ignorance of the methods of sys- 

 tematists. It seems that the spirit of 

 the present-day natural history is 

 rather against collecting, that the 

 best thought is directed to the out-of- 

 doors study of particular groups in 

 some detail rather than to the recogni- 

 tion of a very large number of forms, 

 to the study of their home life with 

 camera and sketch book rather than to 



