Zoological Society. 377 
vegetable kingdom, thus influencing the distribution of Man upon 
earth, his commerce, arts, and habits. These are the chief points 
of Dr. Maury’s little work, in which Hydrography and Meteorology 
have a prominent place, rather than what is usually called ‘‘ Physical 
Geography.”’ 
The author herein brings the many good facts and theories col- 
lected and worked out by long and careful labour in his ‘ Sailing 
Directions’ and ‘ Physical Geography of the Sea’ to bear on the 
evidence of creative design in the arrangement of the “ physical 
machinery of our planet,” taking for his text, we may say, the words 
he quotes from Ecclesiastes, i. 7: ‘All the rivers run into the sea, 
yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, 
thither they return again.” 
After some definitions of geographical terms, the reader learns 
something of water in rivers and the sea—what it is, and what it con- 
tains—and of ice and clouds. The air comes next, its weight and 
pressure, its constitution, its movements, and its power of carrying 
moisture ; and the study of heat, in relation with the earth, air, water, 
and vapour, leads to meteorology and climate and the varied aspects 
of nature. Mr. Tyndall’s eloquent expositions of the nature of heat 
are warmly welcomed in Captain Maury’s pages. Currents of air at 
sea and on land, dry and moist winds, the distribution of rain, the 
general fitness of “terrestrial arrangements”? and of ‘terrestrial 
adaptations,”’ the ‘‘ beauty and benignity ”’ of natural phenomena, so 
well known to the ‘‘ Christian philosopher” who looks to teleologi- 
cal conveniences as the great end and aim of nature,—all these are 
rather wearisomely illustrated and insisted upon by our hydrogra- 
phist, whose well-connected facts would not be less clearly stated, 
nor less easily remembered, if given with less frequent allusions to 
the ‘Sailing Directions,’ on the one hand, and to the perfection of 
the ‘‘ grand physical machine,” on the other. 
Given the sun as operator, water and air as machine, and earth as 
basis, the “ physical machine”’ performs its office ; and Books VII., 
VIII., and IX. treat of the power of heat, of the clouds, the rivers, 
and the sea (especially comparing the southern with the northern 
hemisphere), and of ‘‘ the earth as we behold it.’ Man in relation 
to rivers running north and south, through different climatal zones 
as the Mississippi, for instance), compared with east and west lines 
of traffic (as the Amazon or the Mediterranean),—Man in relation to 
maize as a food adapted for migration, and in relation to regions 
more or less cultivable, is here considered. 
Of volcanic phenomena, of mountain-ranges, of the formation of 
table-lands, valleys, and other features Dr. Maury says nothing ; but 
his little book is complete in itself, hydrographically considered. 
We would, however, that he knew something more of natural his- 
tory—that he would not term the Coral “an insect of the sea”— 
‘the Coralline,”’ nor speak of Rhizopods as “ microscopic insects,” 
and, indeed, that he would not class as ¢zsects all little animals, both 
of land and water, “that are too small to be recognized as beasts, or 
birds, or fishes” (p. 122). 
