8 54 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



a great aid. It contains an appendix con- 

 sisting of useful tables for calculating total 

 solids, etc. (It is published by P. Blakiston, 

 Son & Co., Philadelphia. Pp. 89. Price, 

 $1.) 



A collection of Bulls and Blunders, com- 

 piled by Marshall Brown (Griggs, $1), has 

 recently been issued. It is a large and 

 amusing collection, and besides being amus- 

 ing it is instructive, for where the blunder 

 consists in a faulty arrangement of words, the 

 way to correct it is pointed out. 



Under the title, The Monism, of Man, 

 David Allyn Gorton, M.. D., has put forth a 

 mingled mass of scientific facts and super- 

 natural speculations (Putnam, $2). The 

 book is a hard one to describe. It is not a 

 descriptive treatise on the subject indicated 

 by its title, for it does not even tell any- 

 where what the " monism of man " is. It can 

 not be called a disputation, for it does not 

 attempt to prove anything in particular. It 

 is rather a pleasant, extended essay, in which 

 a man versed in a scientific profession and 

 well read in classic literature and religious 

 lore has set down some things that he knows 

 and others that he believes, together with 

 many quotations from favorite authors, and 

 his own reflections upon the material thus 

 brought together. 



From the University of far-away Tasma- 

 nia comes, by way of an English printing 

 office, an essay on Utility of Quaternions in 

 Physics, written by A. McAulay, in competi- 

 tion for a prize offered by the University of 

 Cambridge (Macmillan, $1.60). In a long 

 and free-spoken preface the author states 

 that the physical applications of quaternions 

 are sadly neglected at Cambridge, in spite of 

 Prof. Tait's powerful advocacy. He ranks 

 himself as a disciple of Prof. Tait in promot- 

 ing the study of this branch of mathemat- 

 ics, but feels compelled to differ from his mas- 

 ter on certain points, some of which he sets 

 forth in his preface. The divisions of phys- 

 ics to which he applies quaternions in this 

 essay are elastic solids, electricity and mag- 

 netism, hydrodynamics, and the vortex atom 

 theory. At the risk of being deemed a mis- 

 directed enthusiast he hopes for a "time 

 when quaternions will appear in every phys- 

 ical text-book that assumes the knowledge of 

 (say) elementary plane trigonometry." 



In the JElem ents of Life Insurance, the 



author, Miles M. Daioson, has sought to give 

 the reader a comprehensive and accurate 

 conception of life insurance, without bur- 

 dening his mind with needless technical 

 terms ; to write what will be most useful to 

 beginners and so as to be intelligible to the 

 general public mind. Besides the analysis 

 of rates and reserves, the scope of the book 

 covers the subject of contracts ; their con- 

 struction, application, nature, and legal 

 effect. Insurance is denned as the equali- 

 zation of fortune. By its provisions, a large 

 number of men arrange to lose small sums 

 in order that none of them may lose a great 

 sum in a specified way. Thus it is the alli- 

 ance of prudent men against misfortune. 

 The book is published by the Independent 

 Printing and Publishing Company, Chicago, 

 at the price of two dollars. 



The Outlines of Embryology of the Eye 

 the Cartwright Prize Essay for 1893 by 

 Dr. Ward A. Holden, is the product of a 

 study carried on at the New York Ophthal- 

 mic and Auric Institute, and is based upon 

 the examination of a great number of speci- 

 mens of eyes of chicks and pigs. Endeavor- 

 ing to give a clear and comprehensive de- 

 scription of the development of the organ, 

 the author has deemed it best to present first 

 a brief and purely schematic sketch of the 

 processes which take place, explaining them 

 with diagrams, and next to give an accurate 

 histological description of the various parts 

 of the eye in their successive phases of de- 

 velopment, illustrating these descriptions 

 with careful drawings from actual prepara- 

 tions. (Published by G. P. Putnam's Sons. 

 Price, Y5 cents.) 



Under the title Manual of Linguistics a 

 great amount of material on the phonology 

 of English and other languages has been 

 brought together by John Clark, a master in 

 the High School of Dundee (Putnam, $2). 

 After an introductory chapter on the culture 

 and original home of the Aryans, the sound 

 relations in the Indo-European languages are 

 considered at some length. From this sub- 

 ject the author passes to various modifica- 

 tions of vowels and consonants, such as as- 

 similation, shortening, lengthening, prothe- 

 sis, epenthesis, contraction, labialism, dental- 

 ism, rhotacism, reduplication, etc. The near- 

 ly related topics ablaut and accent are next 

 considered. The operation of Grimm's law 



