SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE. 



849 



United States, Russia, and other countries, and describes at some length the 

 methods of drilling and operating wells in the United States, with notes on 

 the practice followed elsewhere. The American and the Russian methods 

 of refining petroleum, the distilling of shale oil, which is an important 

 industry in Scotland, and the manufacture of paraffin, are then described. 

 All these accounts are fully illustrated by figures of apparatus, and many 

 tables of production, analyses, etc., are given. In this section there is an 

 interesting sketch of ozokerite mining in Galicia. Mr. Redwood's chapters 

 on lamps are of much popular as well as technical interest. His treatment 

 is largely historical, a few lamps of the ancients being included, and the 

 dates and numbers of the patents issued for the modern forms being given. 

 Sponge lamps, blast lamps, and lamps for railroad cars and ships are de- 

 scribed, as well as the more familiar forms. In this section something 

 about the making of oil gas and air gas is also told. The subject of miners' 

 safety lamps is treated in much the same way. These two sections contain 

 over two hundred of the three hundred and fifty-eight figures in the vol- 

 ume. Gas and electric lighting are left for the next volume of the series. 



GENERAL NOTICES. 



UNDER the editorial care of Prof. C. 

 Lloyd Morgan has appeared the second vol- 

 ume of the work upon which Prof. Romanes * 

 was engaged at the time of his death. The 

 present volume is mainly devoted to a con- 

 sideration of those post- Darwinian theories 

 which involve fundamental questions of 

 heredity or utility. The chapters dealing 

 with heredity are almost exclusively con- 

 cerned with Prof. Weismann's views as to 

 the inheritance of acquired characters. Prof. 

 Romanes presents evidence both for and 

 against such inheritance, and while he agrees 

 with Galton in largely diminishing the po- 

 tency of the Lamarckian principles, he can 

 not go so far as to abolish it as Weismann 

 does. In the chapters grouped under the 

 head of utility he vigorously opposes the 

 doctrine that all species must necessarily be 

 due to natural selection, and therefore must 

 severally present at least one adaptive char- 

 acter as held by Huxley, and he finds still 

 less tenable the more extended form of the 

 same doctrine held by Wallace. Regarding 

 the question as purely one of reasoning, he 

 combats it by argument without appeal to 

 facts. In an appendix he discusses some 

 side issues connected with the principle of 

 panmixia, and in another he states more 



* Darwin and after Darwin. By the late George 

 John Komanes. Vol.11. Pp. 344, 12mo. Chicago: 

 The Open Court Publishing Co. Price, $1.50. 

 VOL. XLVIII. 62 



fully than in the body of the book the opin- 

 ions of Darwin and Huxley on characters as 

 adaptive and specific. The volume contains 

 a portrait of the author as frontispiece and 

 several figures in the text. 



Prof. Tarr's new book on physical geog- 

 raphy* has the character of those recent 

 treatises which have appeared under the title 

 of physiography. It is not a description of 

 the topographical features, climate, animal 

 and vegetable productions, etc., of the sev- 

 eral regions of the earth in the familiar atlas 

 form, accompanied by large maps, but rather 

 a depiction of typical forms assumed by land 

 and water, with accounts of the processes 

 that have produced them. It is thus largely 

 devoted to the dynamic side of its field. 

 After a short description of the earth as a 

 planet, the author sets forth the usual and 

 the occasional phenomena of the atmosphere, 

 and shows how these conditions affect the 

 geographic distribution of animals and plants. 

 Three chapters are given to the form and 

 characteristics of the ocean, leaving about 

 half of the book to the land. In this last 

 part especial attention is given to such agen- 

 cies of change as weather, streams, glaciers, 

 waves, and the internal heat of the earth, 



* Elementary Physical Geography. By Ralph 

 S. Tarr. Pp. 488, 12mo. New York and London: 

 Macmillan & Co. Price, $1.40. 



