LITERAR 7 NO TICKS. 



851 



on a new discovery, on scientific phenomena, 

 against revealed truth, present themselves 

 sooner or later to every priest in the exercise 

 of his ministry " ; and " the priest who knows 

 only his dogmatic and moral theology may 

 be surprised and confounded by objections 

 formulated in entirely new language, sup- 

 ported by pretended fact or by a discovery 

 wrongly interpreted." Father Thein, who is 

 said to be an enthusiastic student of science, 

 to have given years of study and research to 

 anthropology, and to have read the literature 

 of the subject exhaustively, has undertaken 

 in this book to inform his brother clergymen, 

 so that they may not have to go into the con- 

 flict unarmed. He reviews the whole system 

 of modern anthropological science and of 

 evolution, with clear knowledge of what has 

 been written and much force of argument. 

 When he finds a weak point, he exposes it 

 unmercifully, and is not above occasional 

 sarcasm. His treatise is intelligent, good- 

 tempered, and readable. But, because, while 

 he questions science everywhere, he accepts 

 the established dogmas of the Church as 

 fixed, his work is better adapted to satisfy 

 those young priests who want to be supported 

 in what they are determined to believe than 

 those inquiring minds who refuse to admit 

 that the dogmas are beyond investigation. 



The Proceedings of the First Annual 

 Meeting of the National Conference 

 on University Extension. Compiled 

 by George Francis James. Philadel- 

 phia: J. P>. Lippincott Co. Pp. 292. 

 Price, 1.50. 



The spread of the idea of university ex- 

 tension has been rapid, whether the results 

 it has worked out have all been mature 

 or not. Within a year after the first center 

 of extension teaching was established in 

 Philadelphia in November, 1890, Mr. James 

 informs us, more than two hundred such ex- 

 periments were being carried on in nearly 

 every State in the Union. The results of the 

 first year's work showed the need of thought- 

 ful conference and discussion on the part of 

 those engaged in it. Accordingly, a National 

 Conference on the subject was called under 

 the auspices of the American Society for the 

 Extension of University Teaching, and met 

 in Philadelphia in the last days of 1891. It 

 was attended by delegates from twenty 

 States, representing some fifty of the best 



institutions of learning, and either person- 

 ally or by written report every center of 

 extension teaching which had so far been 

 established in the country. The seventeen 

 addresses aud papers made and read at the 

 meeting, and contained in this volume of 

 the proceedings, regard the subject from as 

 many different points of view. In addition 

 to them, reports are given of the condition 

 and prospects of university extension in the 

 several States. 



Matter, Ether, and Motion. By Prof. A. 

 E. Dolbear. Boston: Lee & Shepard. 

 1892. Pp. 334. 



Prof. Dolbear has essayed to give, in 

 this little volume of three hundred odd pages, 

 a brief account of the fundamental notions 

 of modern physics, and to show the direction 

 in which the thoughts of those are tending 

 who are endeavoring to understand the ulti- 

 mate mechanism of what we have been ac- 

 customed to call dead matter. The title of 

 his volume clearly indicates the trend of such 

 thought. To the physicist the hypothetical 

 ether, which Grove in the forties contempt- 

 uously referred to as the clothes-horse upon 

 which to hang the unknown, is becoming 

 more and more a very definite reality. It is 

 to him much more than a working hypothe- 

 sis. He assumes its existence, and is busily 

 occupied in trying to understand its ultimate 

 structure that is, how it must be constituted 

 in order to explain the phenomena with 

 which he has to deal. 



He sees in it now not only a medium for 

 the transmission of the wave-motions which 

 manifest themselves as light, heat, and elec- 

 tricity, but is attempting to find in it the ex- 

 planation of matter itself. The old concep- 

 tion of the atom as simply an ultimate parti- 

 cle, itself dead and inert, but endowed with 

 forces by means of which it acts upon other 

 particles, is giving place to a radically differ- 

 ent one. This conception is that of the vor- 

 tex ring. Any smoker can make one, and 

 they are frequently thrown from the funnel 

 of a locomotive in starting. Such a ring 

 consists of a circle of material, all the parts 

 of which are in rotation in the planes of the 

 radii of the ring. Physicists have conceived 

 that such rings formed in the ether this be- 

 ing postulated as homogeneous and friction- 

 less might constitute the ultimate some- 



