JuLy 10, 1902 | 
its greater principles. The laws enunciated by such men 
as Suess, Heim, Richthofen, Sorby, Brogger, Lehmann, 
Smith, Sedgwick and Darwin are given with genuine 
appreciation and generally illuminated by a brief but 
telling thumb-nail picture of their lives and achieve- 
ments. 
The translator, while suppressing too great detail in 
foreign work, has helped -English readers by fitting into 
its place the occasionally omitted work of English- 
speaking geologists (see pp. 358, 360, &c.). This plan 
might with advantage have been extended ; for instance, 
the work of Milne and Davison on earthquakes, of Allport, 
Bonney and Phillips on petrology, and of Ramsay and 
Topley in the connexion of geology and geography, might 
well have received fuller notice; and the application of 
geology to economic questions still demands its historian, 
who would have many a strange tale of failure and success 
to tell. 
While the chapter on petrography gives the reader a 
good summary of the chief theories enunciated, the 
stages of their proof and their significance in the pro- 
gress of the science, the paleontological section, probably 
from the magnitude of the subject, is not so instructive, 
and does not succeed in giving the reader a clear picture 
of the real meaning of the successive discoveries made. 
Again, the stratigraphical chapter is at the same time 
one of the most difficult to treat fairly, and the one which 
is least balanced in its treatment. The introductory 
part, while giving considerable weight to discoveries in 
paleophytology, is admirable in picking out the chief 
contributions to palzeontology as applied to stratigraphy, 
and in its pronouncement upon such subjects as the 
Sedgwick-Murchison controversy. But the detailed por- 
tion gives less than three pages to the Devonian system, 
omits all account of the zoning of the earlier Palzeozoic 
rocks, and then proceeds to devote almost forty pages 
to the Trias. 
The translators work has been carefully and con- 
scientiously done, and the book reads far better than is 
usually the case with translations. A few slips or ,mis- 
prints are unavoidable, and here and there an ambiguity 
of expression has crept in. We read /orulla (66), 
physician (77), Linnzeus (for /zmaea, 104), on the age of 
the human race (the antiquity of man, 195), Davis (David, | 
| 
253), Euganian Isles (25¢), microscopic (macroscopic, 
309), and aquo-igneous, for which we would venture to 
suggest the less cacophonous hydrothermal. 
The publisher is evidently under the impression that 
the severer form of the German original requires 
tempering to that shorn lamb the British reader. The 
translation has been alleviated by portraits of eminent 
geologists, many of them admirable and some new. 
Those of Suess and of Zittel are excellent, but we can 
hardly bring ourselves to believe that that of Hutton 
is lifelike. Then, in addition to the shortening of 
some of the drier details, we have the wholesale omission 
of the bibliographies which accompany each chapter 
and many sections of the original. We hope and believe 
that this is a mistake. It is the serious student who 
will consult this work; to him the bibliographies are 
essential, and this will drive him to the original. In 
some future edition we hope to see these restored, and 
when this is done we would suggest that even the 
NO. 1706, VOL. 66] 
NATURE 
243 
specialist is deserving of, and will certainly be grateful 
for, anything which helps to pilot him quickly and safely 
to the haven of his inquiries. Such aid as author and 
printer can give are his right. The solid mass of print 
should be broken up by the use of more sections and 
headings, italics and black-faced type, and above all 
good headlines to the pages (as in the original), so that 
a man in search of particular information may find it 
with the least possible expenditure of time and temper. 
But all geologists are grateful to Prof. Zittel for his 
thorough and painstaking labour, for his fairness and 
breadth of view, and for his wonderful grasp of the whole 
of his science; and English-speaking geologists are 
under an especial debt of gratitude to Mrs. Ogilvie- 
Gordon for her timely, accurate, and _ well-written 
translation, 
PLANE SURVEVING. 
Plane Surveying. A Text and Reference Book for 
the Use of Students in Engineering and for Engineers 
Generally. By Paul C. Nugent, A.M., C.E., Associate 
Professor of Civil Engineering, Syracuse University. 
Pp. xvi+577. (New York: John Wiley and Sons ; 
London: Chapman and Hall, Ltd., 1902.) Price 
14s. 6d, 
i dasa book treats of that elementary part of the 
subject of surveying, especially useful to engineers, 
which deals generally with surveys of small areas on large 
scales. Any book on the subject which comes from 
America is worthy of attention, since American practice 
differs in many respects from ours, and this text-book is 
useful for the purpose of comparative study. 
Amongst the subjects dealt with are linear measuring 
instruments and the measurement of lines, chain survey- 
ing, compass surveying, levelling, transit surveying (ze. 
the use of the theodolite), topographical, hydrographic 
and mine surveying, and U.S. Government large-scale 
surveys and resurveys. There are also chapters on the 
theory of telescope construction, the planimeter, the slide 
rule and the solar instrument (sun compass), and an 
appendix on photo-topographic methods. 
We have a good deal to learn from America in the use 
of steel tapes, which for many surveying purposes should 
supersede the chain, and some useful information on 
the question will be found at the beginning of the 
book. The method here described of cutting up the 
ground in a chain (or tape) survey differs from the 
English system, and the latter is preferable. A great 
deal of space is given to surveying with the compass; 
indeed too much space considering the essential in- 
accuracy of all compass methods ; and on the other hand 
but little is said about triangulation with a theodolite or 
traversing with the same instrument, subjects which each 
deserve a chapter to themselves. 
In the chapter on topographical surveying we have 
topographical methods described from the engineering 
surveyors point of view, and for certain large-scale 
engineering topographical surveys the methods mentioned 
are useful. But they are not generally the methods used 
by surveyors on regular topographical surveys, such as 
the topographical branches of the Survey of India or the 
U.S. Geological Survey, and the description given of the 
