550 



NA TURE 



[August 8, 1901 



sentence as was passed in another Italian town on a 

 Cambridge don who had ' Senior Wrangler' inscribed on 

 his passport. The police translated it as 'inveterate 

 brawler'; and he was in consequence denied permission 

 to travel, and was detained eight days before being 

 allowed to proceed." 

 Chemical Lecture Experiments. By Francis Gano 



Benedict, Ph.D. Pp. xiv + 436. (New York: The 



Macmillan Company, 1901.) 

 The days of that ancient bugbear, the "Guide to Know- 

 ledge," containing in the form of questions and answers 

 a concise rhiniu' of all " the scientific facts that a well- 

 educated boy or girl should have learnt," are fast coming 

 to an end. Dr. Benedict has struck another blow at 

 them in issuing his manual of " Chemical Lecture Ex- 

 periments." The aim of the book is to furnish teachers 

 with a set of trustworthy experiments which can be 

 carried out with ordinary, simple apparatus, all others 

 being rigorously excluded. 



It is unnecessary nowadays to comment on the value 

 of experimental demonstrations in a lecture-room, and, 

 as the author points out in his preface, it is unwise to 

 neglect them and trust entirely to laboratory exercises. 

 The latter, " however great their influence in developing 

 the experimental side of teaching the science, have their 

 limitations experimentally and educationally, and cannot 

 supplant the experimental lecture, for it is in the lecture, 

 and there only, where each experiment stands out clearly 

 defined and unattended by the distractions necessarily 

 accompanying laboratory e.xercises, that the first accurate 

 observations of chemical phenomena can be made by 

 students." 



The testimony and example of such illustrious teachers 

 as Bunsen, Liebig, \'ictor Meyer, and in our own 

 day of Ostwald, Fischer and Moissan, are arguments 

 strong enough to overcome any objections, and Dr. 

 Benedict is to be congratulated on his efforts to lighten 

 the task of the overworked and much-abused teacher. 

 Although he may not be able to lay claim to any great 

 originality, the field having already been pioneered by 

 Arendt and Heumann and Newth, he has succeeded in 

 collecting a good series of experiments to illustrate an 

 elementary course of inorganic chemistry, which, by 

 reason of the careful descriptions and clear diagrams, 

 will commend themselves to all who are conducting 

 classes with only a very limited supply of apparatus and 

 means. 



A Manual of Laboratory Physics. By H. M. Tory, 



M.A., and F. H. Pitcher, M.Sc. Pp. ix -f 284. (New 



York : John Wiley and Sons, 1901.) 

 The rapid extension of the study of practical physics in 

 recent years is shown by the number of books which 

 have been published lately dealing with this subject, 

 but we cannot say that much originality has been shown 

 either in the mode of treatment or in subject matter. 

 The exercises are generally those with which teachers 

 are well acquainted. In this book the object of the 

 authors has been to compile notes which will save the 

 demonstrator as much separate explanation as possible. 

 It will therefore be of use in laboratories where funds do 

 not permit many assistant demonstrators to be employed. 



The book deals with the whole of physics e.xcept 

 mechanics and hydrostatics. Each exercise is divided 

 into the following sections : References to books dealing 

 with the special phenomenon ; apparatus required ; 

 theory of the experiment ; practical directions; example; 

 and a blank to be filled in by the student. 



There are a few points about which a word or two may 

 be said. We should have liked to have seen more stress 

 laid on the necessity of students recording the precise 

 nature of the quantities in terms of which their measure- 

 ments are made. It is not well for them, for example, to 

 see the velocity of sound expressed as 34230 cm. Some 



NO. 1658, VOL. 64] 



of the diagrams leave much to be desired ; that of the 

 trace left by a tuning-fork on a falling smoked plate is 

 strangely irregular. The present writer has not tried 

 this experiment under the conditions shown in the figure, 

 but he would expect to get a more intelligible record. 

 The trace obtained with the pendulum-chronograph is 

 also very unlike what we should expect. 



The simple wire bridge for measuring resistances is 

 described as the B..\. bridge. We were under the im- 

 pression that the particular modification introduced by 

 the committee of the British Association was that in 

 which arrangements were made for using Carey Foster's 

 system of interchanging a pair of nearly equal coils. 



A good deal of attention is given to the testing and 

 calibration of ammeters. This is very useful to those 

 students going on to the engineering side of physics. 



It may be of interest to consider the directions in 

 which a development of practical physics teaching may 

 be expected. There seem to be two ways open for this 

 to take place. The first is to make the laboratory 

 exercises follow precisely the course of lectures, so that 

 the student performs experiments which illustrate what 

 he has been taught in the lecture. This is the rational 

 way of coordinating the teaching and practical work, 

 but it is open to the objection that a much larger stock of 

 apparatus is required. The second direction of develop- 

 ment is to allow the student to make the greater part 

 of his apparatus, and this forms the best training for 

 research. Such books as Prof Threlfall's " Laboratory 

 Arts'' is a step in the latter direction, whilst some of 

 the modern more elementary text-books are on the 

 former plan. 



In another way this book is of interest to us, as it 

 shows the standard of work reached in the elementary 

 classes in the McGill University, where the physical 

 laboratory is one of the finest and best fitted departments. 

 So far as one can judge, the standard is much the same 

 as in similar classes at home. S. S. 



Tlie Story of Wild Flowers. By Rev. Prof. G. Henslow, 

 M.A., F.L.S., F.G.S., &c. With forty-six figures in 

 text. Pp. viii + 249. (London: George Newnes, Ltd., 

 1 90 1.) Price \s. 

 This interesting little book contains much more than its 

 title might seem to imply, since it treats, not only of 

 flowers, but also of the lives and forms of flowering 

 plants, their distribution and evolution. Though both 

 readable and instructive, this booklet loses much in value 

 as a trustworthy popular introduction to botany because 

 its author has elected to saturate it with the extreme form 

 of neo-Lamarckism, of which he is so fervid and, in this 

 country, so isolated an advocate. Much of Prof 

 Henslow's treatment of the subject is refreshing, and in 

 this respect the chapters on stipules and on vegetative 

 sports, as well as the occasional references to horticul- 

 tural operations, are especially worthy of note. The 

 author's views on morphology do not, however, always 

 accord with modern opinions ; he writes, for instance, 

 '■ The leaf usually consists of two parts, the leaf-stalk . . . 

 and the blade ..." (p. 64). "The homology of bracts 

 is various. They may be stifular as in Magnolias, more 

 generally are petiolar as in Hellebore ..." (p. 97). 

 Other not generally accepted views are those ex- 

 pressed in reference to the cause of the rosette-form of 

 " high Alpine plants " (p. 103), the significance of circum- 

 nutation in twiners (p. 100), and the object of movements 

 of leaves (p. 104). But most open to criticism are the 

 explanations offered of the origin of certain structural 

 and habitual features by the inheritance of the effects of 

 repeated stimuli. In the second volume, on non-European 

 flowering plants, which the author half promises, it is to 

 be hoped that attention will be directed rather to the 

 well-tested facts of evolution than to mere hypotheses as 

 to the precise causes of evolution in special cases. 



