1875.] Notices of Books. 373 
of creation which has brought them thus near to himself in the 
scale of animal being.” 
The view that the rest of the animal world exists solely in 
reference to man he rightly treats as a “‘ vulgar notion.” Every 
part of Natural History, and very especially the history disclosed 
to us by fossil remains, utterly annuls any such conception. It 
would not be too much to affirm that not one-hundredth part of 
the animal creation, counted by species, has relation, direct or 
indirect, to man’s existence on earth. 
Of the reasoning power of brutes, he remarks—‘* No happier 
definition can be given than that of Cuvier: ‘ Leur intelligence 
exécute des opérations du méme genre.’ ” 
Into a large part of these papers—such as those on Evil in 
the World, the Perfectibility of Man, Natural Theology, Dif- 
ferences of Religious Belief, Scepticism and Credulity, History, 
Shakspeare, &c.—we cannot here enter. If the work contains 
nothing novel in fact or in generalisation, it is, we think, not 
unsuggestive. The breadth and liberality of its spirit might 
well atone for even greater deficiency in originality and power. 
On a Peculiar Fog seen in Iceland, and on Vesicular Vapour. 
By R. Aneus Situ, Ph.D., F.R.S., &c. London: Taylor 
and Francis. 
METEOROLOGISTS generally suppose that clouds, fog, &c., consist 
of particles of water in a hollow or vesicular form, something 
like minute balloons or soap-bubbles. One of the originators of 
this view was Edmund Halley, the astronomer, who, in the 
** Philosophical Transactions’ (abridged, vol. ii., p. 428), ex- 
plains the “‘ rising of vapour by warmth, by showing that if an 
atom of water were expanded into a shell or bubble so as to be 
ten times as large in diameter as when it was water, such an 
atom would become specifically lighter than air.” It is scarcely 
needful to remind the reader that water, in order to become spe- 
cifically lighter than air, would require to be expanded very far 
more than ten times. In 1743, Gottlieb Kratzenstein, of Halle, 
in his ‘“‘ Theorie de l’Elévation des Vapeurs et des Exhalations”’ 
(Bordeaux, 1743), maintained that “vapours are hollow vesi- 
cles,” though he admits that they have no absolute lightness 
and cannot lose their specific gravity. Hamberger, Professor of 
Physics and Medicine at the University of Zena, also published, 
in the same year, a dissertation on the subject, to which a prize 
was adjudged by the Academy of Bordeaux. In this he shows 
that the weight of water cannot be reduced by increasing the 
size of the vesicles, or, indeed, by making vesicles at all. 
H. D. de Saussure, in his “ Essais surl’ Hygrométrie ” (p. 282), 
assumes the existence of vesicles, or hollow spheres, and endea- 
