SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE. 



133 



The account is in the form of letters 

 from the father to a friend, describing 

 his experiments with his son Philip in 

 this method of teaching. He has al- 

 ways cultivated fellowship with the 

 boy; and, finding him inclined to im- 

 prove and add to the designs on the 

 wall-paper, puts objects to be drawn 

 and copied in his way, and induces him 

 to go out and draw from Nature. So 

 the boy learns to study forms and ob- 

 serve. To teach language he gives him 

 regularly the daily German newspaper, 

 to pick out what he can from it, and 

 joins him in the sport. In a similar 

 way he introduces Philip to surveying 

 and physics, and other branches of sci- 

 ence. The plan is a success; Philip 

 attracts attention by the ingenuity 

 which his training has enabled him to 

 develop, and going to college is gradu- 

 ated with credit and in possession of a 

 live as well as a book knowledge of 

 what he has studied. 



In The Story of the English (Ameri- 

 can Book Company) the more promi- 

 nent facts of English history from the 

 beginning to the present time are re- 

 lated by H. A. Gaerber in simple, brief 

 narratives. A commendable feature of 

 the book is the insistence in the preface 

 of the essential oneness of the English 

 and American people — an idea that can 

 hardly be too sedulously cultivated. 

 The author's principal object has been 

 to render pupils so familiar with the 

 prominent characters of English history 

 that they shall henceforth seem like old 

 acquaintances, and, in addition, to 

 make the story attractive; but it is a 

 fact to be regretted that he has regarded 

 the growth of English law and liberty 

 and the changes in religion as too un- 

 intelligible and uninteresting to be 

 more than touched upon " very briefly 

 and in the most simple way." The 

 growth of law and liberty are the very 

 things that it is most important to fix 

 the attention of children upon, and it 

 is only because they have suffered com- 

 parative neglect in the education of 

 teachers in favor of stories of war and 

 intrigue that they are not the most in- 

 telligible and interesting branch of the 

 subject. 



Prof. Francis E. Nipher, of Wash- 

 ington University, having been called 

 upon to present a paper to an educa- 



tional convention on the Greater Effi- 

 ciency of Science Instruction, under- 

 took to show how such changes as were 

 adapted to promote that end might be 

 accomplished without radical depart- 

 ures from present methods; and the 

 Introduction to Graphical Algebra 

 (Henry Holt & Co., New York, 60 

 cents) is the result of that effort. The 

 author believes that the study of alge- 

 bi'a and geometry as distinct subjects 

 having no relation to each other gives 

 the pupil a false idea of the intellectual 

 situation of to-day; that by injecting 

 here and there into the ordinary in- 

 struction in algebra such material as is 

 found in his book, new meaning will 

 be given to the operations involved in 

 the solution of equations, and new in- 

 terest in the subject may be aroused; 

 and that as scientific investigators are 

 making much use of other methods 

 than Euclid's, while the study of Ms 

 geometry should not be banished from 

 our schools, some of the time given to 

 it might be usefully spent in elementary 

 analytical geometry or graphical alge- 

 bra. The treatise is brief and conven- 

 ient in size and composed in clear lan- 

 guage. ■> 



The New Man, a Chronicle of the 

 Modern Time (Philadelphia: The Levy- 

 type Company), is a story written by 

 Ellis Paxson Oberholzer with reference 

 to that expansion of women's educa- 

 tion and sphere of action which is sug- 

 gested by the phrase " the new wom- 

 an." In it " the new woman is devel- 

 oped to her logical conclusion, and the 

 new man as he must needs become un- 

 der the reaction of her influence," and 

 it deals with " men and women imbued 

 with the modern university spirit, 

 whose emotional natures are developed 

 under the scientific impulse of our 

 time, and whose thoughts and actions 

 reflect that impulse in the midst of all 

 the varied realities of our modern life." 



Armageddon (Rand, McNally & 

 Co.), to the plot of which the author's 

 name of Stanley Waterloo seems curi- 

 ously appropriate, is possibly a speci- 

 men of a class of literature to which we 

 are likely to be treated in abundance 

 for a few years to come. The spoliation 

 of the Spanish Egyptians by the Ameri- 

 cans having come to a halt -with the 

 gain of Puerto Rico and the Philippines, 



