LITERARY NOTICES. 



417 



of finding oil and ga8 in paying quantities 

 within the limits of the State and the dis- 

 tricts in which searching for them will be 

 most hopeful. He believes that the accu- 

 mulation of oil is connected with certain 

 uplifts of the strata indicating faults, and 

 points out certain lines of such dislocations 

 as regions in which the discovery of oil or 

 gas is more or less probable. 



Proceedings and Transactions of the Sci- 

 entific Association. Meriden, Conn. 

 1885-'86. Charles H. S. Davis, M. D., 

 Secretary. Pp. 64. 



The Association, at the beginning of its 

 sixth year, had one hundred and thirty 

 members. Nine papers were read before it 

 in 1885 and eight in 1886 ; an excursion was 

 made to the Portland quarries ; and among 

 the lecturers in lSSe-W were Alfred Rus- 

 sel Wallace and Professor Alexander Win-* 

 chell. The volume of the Transactions con- 

 tains an account of the Catopterus gracilis, 

 a fossil fish found at Little Falls, by Dr. Da- 

 vis ; a study of " the Hanging Hills," as the 

 trap ridge at Meriden is called, by J. H. 

 Chapin, D. D. ; "A Notice of Certain Fossil 

 Plants in the Quarries at Durham " ; "A List 

 of the Birds of Meriden," by Franklin Piatt ; 

 " Additional Plants found growing at Meri- 

 den," by Mrs. C. B. Kendrick ; and a poem 

 on " West Peak, and what it saith," by the 

 Rev. J. T. Pettes. 



A Century of Electricity. By T. C. Men- 

 denhall. Boston : Houghton, Mifflin & 

 Co. Pp. 229. Price, $1.25. 



In this book Professor Mendenhall has 

 presented within a small compass an ac- 

 count free from technicalities, of the growth 

 of the world's knowledge of electricity and 

 its applications. The frictional electric ma- 

 chine, the Leyden-jar, and Franklin's light- 

 ning-rod, represented about all that was 

 known concerning electricity in 1786, when 

 Galvani turned a gastronomic delicacy to ac- 

 count as an instrument for scientific research. 

 Volta's invention of the battery, or " pile," 

 followed within the next decade, and made 

 possible the rapid progress in electrical 

 discovery which followed. Nicholson, Car- 

 lisle, Davy, Wollaston, and Daniell, are 

 some of the prominent names of the next 

 few years. 



In 1820, Oersted, the son of a Danish 

 vol. xxxi. 27 



apothecary, who had become Professor of 

 Physics in the University of Copenhagen, 

 discovered the action of a current of elec- 

 tricity on a suspended magnetic needle. 

 Within one week after hearing of Oersted's 

 discovery, Ampere had worked out the fun- 

 damental principles on which rests the whole 

 science of electro-dynamics. The credit of 

 discovering that electro-magnets of great 

 power may be made by winding the core 

 with manv turns of insulated wire, belongs 

 to an American Joseph Henry and the 

 telegraph was first made a permanent com- 

 mercial success by another American Pro- 

 fessor Morse although various forms of 

 the needle-telegraph had appeared in Rus- 

 sia, Germany, and England. 



Multiplex telegraphy and the use of sub- 

 marine cables are extensions which followed 

 in due time. With the discoveries of Gal- 

 vani and Oersted must be ranked another, 

 by Faraday, on which rest " nearly all the 

 more recent and more striking applications 

 of the electric current." This was the dis- 

 covery of electro-magnetic induction. The 

 dynamo-electric machine, and with it the 

 commercial use of the electric light, were 

 thus made possible. The discovery that the 

 dynamo is reversible, i. e., that it will run as 

 a motor if a current is supplied, opened the 

 way for the next great step, hardly yet con- 

 summated, the electric transmission of force. 

 Meanwhile electricity had been set at work 

 in the domain of acoustics also, and that 

 wonderful invention, the telephone, was pro- 

 duced. The development of electrical stor- 

 age, and the direct production of electricity 

 from heat, belong rather to the coming than 

 to the completed " Century of Electricity." 



The Story of Ancient Egypt. By George 

 Rawlinson, with the Collaboration of 

 Arthur Gilman. New York : G. P. Put- 

 nam's Sons. Pp. 408. Price, $1.50. 

 The history of this most ancient of the 

 empires of the earth, with its old and ad- 

 vanced civilization, is here told in a con- 

 nected, current manner, more satisfactorily 

 than in any other book for popular reading 

 with which we are acquainted. The history 

 of Egypt is in fact hard to present accept- 

 ably to the general public. The ancient 

 writers upon whom we once depended were 

 inadequate and contradictory. The modern 

 sources the recovered monuments and in- 



