852 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



recognition and the use, in ordinary talk and 

 work, of the English names, and a list of all 

 the popular names of plants belonging to our 

 area, so far as they could be obtained, com- 

 piled by Judge Brown, is given in the general 

 English index. A considerable number of 

 the popular names occur in the text, in con- 

 nection with the leading English names, or 

 in the notes ; and several thousand others, 

 which could not appear in the text, are given 

 in the index in Italics. The authors believe 

 that no similar compilation of American 

 plant names has ever been published. 



The American Agriculturist Yearbook 

 and Almanac for 1898 is the third number 

 of that publication, the plan of which is to 

 make each annual volume valuable of itself, 

 and properly supplementary of its pred- 

 ecessors. It proposes to be a cyclopaedia of 

 events, a market guide, a treasury of statis- 

 tics, and a reference work on subjects of 

 timely interest. The present number con- 

 tains, first, almanac matter, general notes, 

 and agricultural miscellany ; an article on 

 Our own Country and Government, with no- 

 tices of all the States and portraits of their 

 governors ; Our Neighbors North and South 

 of Us (Canada, Mexico, and North and South 

 America); The Great Problems of 1898 (a 

 summary of the present condition of impor- 

 tant questions and interests) ; For the Whole 

 Family (in which a variety of useful or curi- 

 ous things are considered) ; The Agricultur- 

 ist's Guide, Commercial Agriculture, Irriga- 

 tion, Lumber and Forestry, and a number 

 of miscellaneous paragraphs. (Orange Judd 

 Company, New York. Price, 50 cents.) 



Part XII, March 7, 1898, of Minnesota 

 Botanical Studies, Conway MacMillan, State 

 Botanist, embraces the title-page and tables 

 of contents and the index of a series of 

 original, most competent, and highly valu- 

 able and interesting studies of plant phe- 

 nomena published as Bulletin No. 9 of the 

 Geology and Natural History of the State, 

 and forming a volume of 1081 pages. 



Much interesting information is well 

 packed in a small space in Prof. Sydney J. 

 Hickson^s Story of Life in the Seas (D. Ap- 

 pleton and Company's Library of Useful 

 Stories ; price, 40 cents). Without presuming 

 to treat in full any of the aspects in which 

 marine life may be regarded, the author's 



purpose has been only to give a sketch of 

 some of the most important lines of scien- 

 tific researches pursued by zoologists in many 

 parts of the world ; to compress into small 

 compass and describe in language intelligible 

 to the laity discoveries of the deepest interest 

 which are in many cases described in books 

 and periodicals that do not come within reach 

 of the general public. The first chapter re- 

 lates the progress and describes the more 

 prominent facts of oceanography. The suc- 

 ceeding chapters are given to accounts of 

 shallow-water fauna, the shallow-water fauna 

 of the tropics, invertebrate and vertebrate 

 surface-swimming fauna, deep-sea fauna (in 

 which many new and remarkable discoveries 

 are recorded), commensalism and parasitism ; 

 and in the final chapter the origin of the 

 marine fauna is considered and the reasons 

 are mentioned for supposing that life origi- 

 nated in the sea. 



Prof. Dean C Worcester, of the Univer- 

 sity of Michigan, and Frank A. Bourns 

 publish in the Proceedings of the United 

 States National Museum lists of the birds 

 that inhabit the Philippine and Palawan 

 Islands, which show their distribution within 

 the limits of the two groups. 



The investigations and explorations con- 

 nected with the Hopkins Seaside Laboratory, 

 adjunct to the Biological Laboratory of Le- 

 land Stanford Junior University, have been 

 carried on by means of assistance given by 

 Mr. Timothy Hopkins, of Menlo Park, Cal. 

 The tenth memoir of this series is a paper on 

 Scientific Names of Greek and Latin Deriva- 

 tion, prepared by Prof. Walter Miller, and 

 furnishing rules and hints to aid in giving 

 such names an etymologically correct shap- 

 ing. The memoirs are published as a part 

 of the proceedings of the California Academy 

 of Sciences. 



The Centralization of Administration in 

 New York State is a valuable political study 

 contributed by John Archibald Fairlie to 

 series of Studies in History, Economics, and 

 Public Law of Columbia University. It 

 shows how power, all centralized in the hands 

 of the Governor in the early history of the 

 country, was gradually taken away from him 

 during the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- 

 turies, when the towns gained a practical in- 

 dependence in local affairs, recognized imder 



