1875.] Nottces of Books. 357 
§ 
cess of Wanklyn and Chapman is the only practical mode of 
water analysis for sanitary purposes. But he points out that 
though waters containing much organic nitrogen are certainly 
bad, those containing little are not necessarily good. He men- 
tions a public pump in Waterford, the water of which contained 
more than 4 grs. of ammonia and 3 of nitric acid per imperial 
gallon. The question is sometimes asked by the unthinking, 
why, if polluted waters are so injurious, our ancestors, who were 
more ignorant and careless of such matters than ourselves, were 
not entirely extirpated ? The answer is at once apparent :—The 
pollution of water increases. with the density of the population, 
—a process which is at this moment going on in a most striking 
manner in some of the New England states. 
In speaking of the sewage question, Dr. Cameron remarks 
that the A BC process has failed. We fear that he makes this 
rash statement on the misleading authority of the late ‘* Rivers’ 
Pollution Commissioners.” Had he taken the trouble to examine 
into the matter himself, he would have come to a very different 
conclusion. 
We can most sincerely recommend this Manual to officers of 
health, public analysts, municipal corporations, boards of 
guardians, and, in short, to all whose duties involve a knowledge 
of sanitary conditions, sanitary reform, and sanitary legislation. 
The Identity of Primitive Christianity and Modern Spiritualism. 
By EuGENE CrowELL, M.D. Vol. I. New York: G. W. 
Carleton and Co. London: Tribner and Co. 
To pass any formal judgment upon this work, without having pre- 
viously made Spiritualism the object of exclusive study, would be 
at once difficult and unfair. Not feeling so qualified, we must be 
content with attempting to furnish a brief exposition of the 
author’s views, without either advocacy on the one hand or refu- 
tation on the other. ‘There are here a certain number of pheno- 
mena. What is their explanation? By the majority of the 
educated world, including most men of science, all so-called 
materialists (apneumatists), and the bulk of practical ‘‘ common- 
sense characters,” they are set down, often with little inquiry, as 
a mixture of delusion and of conscious imposition. A small 
class, whilst believing that the subject has been greatly compli- 
cated both by fraud and by enthusiasm, hold that there still 
remains a substratum of facts which, if rightly dealt with, might 
point the way to natural laws of the profoundest significance,— 
perhaps to some modification of force far more nearly connected 
with the phenomena of life than is electricity or magnetism. A 
third party—among whom rank, perhaps, the majority of ortho- 
dox clergymen and the bulk of “religious society ’—view the 
