196 



NATURE 



[June 26, 1890 



the good man, it corresponds to a real fact that pleasures 

 do differ according to the position they occupy in the 

 whole moral order, and that this is reflected in the 

 judgment of good men. 



But while Jevons's critical attack is successful in the 

 above points, it fails even of its limited object in the 

 attack on Mill's doctrine of resemblance, which is a 

 mere verbal criticism and a misinterpretation. Mill limits 

 the name of propositions of resemblance to those which 

 explicitly state resemblance, or the particular form of 

 resemblance called equality. But because he shows that 

 attributes, propositions, syllogisms, inductive methods, 

 analogy, all involve resemblance, and the word is used on 

 every page of the discussion of these subjects, Jevons 

 accuses him of contradiction. The fallacy of the criticism 

 is obvious. Though all argument and reasoning may 

 depend on resemblance, they need not be concerned with 

 resemblances as such. Who would say when he feels 

 two similar impressions, and feels them therefore simi- 

 larly, that he necessarily feels and thinks of their similarity 

 as an explicit relation subsisting between them ? 



The sketch which Prof. Adamson gives of Jevons's full 

 plan leads to the presumption that the rest of his criticisms 

 would have been of the same kind as those published. 

 As one of the subjects discussed is the theory of the 

 syllogism, and of inference from particulars to particulars, 

 reference may be made to the impartial and sagacious 

 treatment of the same subject in Mr. Bosanquet's " Logic," 

 made by a writer of a very different school from Mill. 

 Those who look to what Jevons effected in political eco- 

 nomy and logic will not be able to avoid regretting that 

 he should have felt it his duty to bestow so much of 

 the energies of his fine intellect upon a task for which, 

 except for an acuteness not much greater than that of 

 hundreds of students of Mill, he was disqualified by 

 lacking the most essential requisite of a critic. 



THE WASHINGTON MEDICAL LIBRARY. 

 The Index Catalogue of the Library of the Surgeon- 

 General's Office, U.S.A. Vol. X. O— Pfutsch. (Wash- 

 ington : Government Printing Office, 1889.) 

 IT has always been a pleasure to watch the steady 

 growth of this unique Catalogue, and the pleasure 

 increases when we see it now within four, or at most five, 

 years of its completion with the same accurate finish in 

 detail as when its first volume appeared in 1880. It 

 bears on it throughout the stamp of Mr. J. S. Billing's 

 hand, and the elaborate method of cataloguing both 

 books and all signed journalistic articles under the sub- 

 ject-heading, as well as all the books and republished 

 articles under the author's name also, has been fully justi- 

 fied in its results, and has shown its very high value in these 

 ten volumes. This volume can give some clue to the 

 labour that has been involved in that system by its article 

 on " Periodicals," which has been most justly thought so 

 remarkable, as well as useful, as to have been republished 

 by itself. Room can just be found in 212 large quarto 

 pages for the titles of the medical journals— daily, weekly, 

 monthly, quarterly — and the annual reports not only of 

 hospitals, but of all medical and surgical societies, 

 on many matters touching more or less on professional 

 NO. TO78, VOL. 42] 



matters. These amount to some 7250 entries, and some 

 43,670 volumes. That is a total of medical periodical 

 literature which is not approximately reached by the 

 British Museum, the Bibliothfeque Nationale of Paris, or 

 any other library, general or professional, in the world. 

 Of course some thousands of these entries— about half,, 

 in fact — do not represent living current publications, but 

 about 3600 may be calculated as the total of current 

 medical periodicals catalogued, using the term periodical 

 in the wide sense that will include such publications as 

 the " Theriaki, a Magazine devoted to the interests of the 

 opium-eater," the " Revue Spirite, ed. par Allan Kardec," 

 and the " American Rushlight, by Peter Porcupine." We 

 do not notice any single continuous periodical that has 

 published more than 314 bound volumes such as are fur- 

 nished by the Annales de Chimie, which has been un- 

 interrupted since 1790. A few old Latin Annales, or 

 Acta, date back to 1692-6, but do not run to any length. 



Looking at them as distributed by the countries of their 

 publication, the largest number of past and current 

 together falls to the United States, viz. about 2000; 

 but it must be admitted that on the whole they are smaller 

 and shorter-lived than their fellows, and are more con- 

 stantly changing their names, a point which is carefully 

 and usefully noted in the Catalogue. The German Empire 

 has rather more than France, viz. about iioo to 900; 

 Great Britain about 700, Italy about 450, and so on till 

 we come to Syria with two, and Malta with only one. 

 Among so many it can hardly be feasible to avoid every 

 possible mistake. It is a pity, for instance, to enter two 

 such similar publications as the Transactions of the Royal 

 Medical and Chirurgical Society, and of the Clinical 

 Society, the one under Medical and Chirurgical, and the 

 other under Transactions. 



This immense mass of literature, however, gives to any- 

 one who looks into it a very striking impression of all the 

 careful labour that must have been necessary to tabulate 

 all the articles in these so-called periodicals under the 

 subject-headings, as has been done, so that the inquirer 

 under any of the commoner subjects may find himself at 

 any moment referred back to an article in a Dutch paper 

 more than 1 50 years ago. 



The " Pest " is the name chosen under which to group all 

 the ancient and modern accounts of the vague and terrible 

 plagues. Under that heading are to be found four editions 

 of Defoe's classical tract on the Plague of London. The 

 collection under this heading of archaeological works well 

 illustrates the energy of the American librarians, and the 

 funds that must have been placed at their disposal, for 

 we find of books printed in the fifteenth century 6 dealing 

 with it, of the sixteenth century 169, and of the seven- 

 teenth century 207 — of themselves not an easy collection 

 to make in the last 30 years on either side of the Atlantic. 



A. T. Myers. 



OUR BOOK SHELF. 



Food in Health and Disease. By J. Burney Yeo, M.D., 



F.R.C.P., Professor of Clinical Therapeutics in King's 



College, London, and Physician to King's College 



Hospital. (London: Cassell and Co., 1889.) 



A GOOD book on food is greatly wanted, one treating of 



the varieties of food, and their arrangement in the 



dietaries of health and disease. In some respects Dr. 



