NATORE 
[Nov. 11, 1869 
alone. We have no doubt that this excellent little work 
will be a great success, but we should like the elementary 
principles of dynamics more amply illustrated. The ntro- 
duction of the principle of limits on several occasions is 
highly commendable: the student should make its ac- 
quaintance early, but we believe in the old methods of proof 
to bring the matters more home to students, although they 
start, in a scientific view, from an inconsistency.—B. L., 
Geodesy.— Studie tiber hohere Geodasie, By Dr. C, 
Bremiker. (Herlin, 1869.) 
FROM great scientific undertakings, such as geographical 
expeditions, or geodetical, geological, and magnetic sur- 
veys of large areas, mankind generally derives, besides 
the utility of the work itself, a vast amount of contingent 
benefit. The resu’t forms not only a landmark of scien- 
tific progress, but the work serves also for applying and 
testing a number of antecedent theoretical or practical 
discoveries, for separating what is sound from the un- 
sound, and finally it rouses contemporaneously the mental 
energy of those more or less intimately connected with 
it to new exertions. 
Of such a wide bearing is the great European arc- 
measurement now in progress, in which for the first time 
the curvature of parallels of latitude will be simulta- | 
neously determined with that of the meridians, and the 
question will be decided whether the figure of the earth, 
as represented by the surface of the ocean, is really an 
ellipsoid of rotation, or whether a triaxial ellipsoid will 
have to be substituted for it. Of the mathematical, 
physical, and geodetical investigations, which the progress 
of this great work has already created, Dr. Bremiker’s 
ranks among the foremost. 
latitude, azimuth, difference in longitude, latitude, and 
azimuth, small angles, deduction of triangles ; 
The mathematical attainments necessary for understand- 
ing this excellent little work are not too high, and we feel 
certain that nobody who takes an interest in higher sur- 
veying will read it without extending his experience and 
knowledge. 18}, 1 
Our Bodies. By Ellis A. Davidson. Cassell, 
Petter, and Galpin.) 
WE cannot highly commend this little book, though we 
would wish to speak well of its author. He is evidently a 
thoroughly good and earnest teacher; and we have no 
doubt his oral lessons are far better than his written book, 
which may be described as “ Goody Lessons in Physio- 
logy, written in words of either one or of more than five 
syllables.” It consists of many terribly stony technicalities 
floating in a mass of very pappy information. On one 
page we find children warned, on physiological grounds, 
not to crack hard nuts with their teeth, and on another a 
description of the axis-cylinder of nerves, the white 
Substance of Schwann, and the canaliculi of bone. 
When will popular teachers of physiology and anatomy 
find out that these sciences are best taught free from 
technical hard nuts which splinter the enamel of the 
mind and worse? In not a few respects, too, we observe 
that “ our bodies” of Mr. Davidson are not the same as 
our bodies. 
The Intelligence of Animals. 
Ernest Menaul. 
Galpin.) 
THE intelligence of animals may be studied in a scientific 
or in an anecdotal manner. M. Menault has chosen the 
latter method. We have not been led to form a very 
high opinion of his physiology or of his general philo- 
sophy ; but he has compiled a most entertaining volume, 
crammed with most amusing stories about all kinds of 
animals, from ants to ourang-outangs. It is illustrated 
with numerous pictures, some of which are as good as the 
stories, 
(London : 
) 
From the French of 
(London: Cassell, Petter, and 
It discusses the methods of | 
reduction with reference to deviation of the plumb-line, | 
and | 
employs everywhere practical and interesting formule. | 
EARTHQUAKE WAVES IN THE PACIFIC 
iG) NLIKE their great rivals, the Himalayas, which seem 
to have upreared themselves to a position where 
they can remain at rest, the Andes are disturbed from 
time to time by tremendous throes, whose effects are 
sometimes felt over a full third part of the earth’s surface. 
To this class belonged the earthquake of August 13-14, 
1868, and in many respects it was the most remarkable of 
all the great earth-throes which have desolated the neigh- 
bourhood of the Peruvian Andes. As in the great earth- 
quake which overthrew Riobamba in 1797, a tremendous 
vertical upheaval seems simultaneously to have affected a 
region of enormous extent. But terrible as were the 
direct effects of the first vertical shock and the others 
which followed, it was the action of the earth-throe on the 
ocean which caused the greatest devastation. It is 
hardly necessary to recall to the reader’s remembrance 
the fearful effects experienced at Chala, at Arica, and at 
other places along the Peruvian shore ; for few, doubt- 
less, have forgotten how a countryman of our own*de- 
scribed the ominous retreat of the ocean, and the over- 
mastering fury with which it rushed back and swept far 
inland, destroying at once the shipping it carried with it, 
and the buildings which it encountered in its course. 
So fearful a disturbance of the seas around the Peru- 
vian shores could not but generate a widely-extended 
oscillation of the waters of the great Pacific Ocean. Yet 
it is impossible to hear, without surprise, of the enormous 
waves which reached the tar-oft shores of the islands 
which lie scattered over that enormous ocean-tract. The 
accounts which came gradually in of waves which had 
swept past Honolulu and Hilo, into the ports of Yokohama 
and Lyttleton, and had even disturbed the waters which 
surround the East Indian Archipelago, seemed at first 
scarcely explicable as the direct results of a disturbance 
occurring so many thousands of miles from those places. 
But when the accounts are carefully compared together, 
they are found to point most clearly to the South American 
shores as the true centre whence the great wave of dis- 
turbance had spread over the whole surface of the Pacific. 
Professor von Hochstetter* has brought together all the 
accounts which seem to throw light on the progress of the 
great earthquake-waves from Arica. For the most part, 
unfortunately, the waves visited the islands and ports of 
* Petermann’s “‘Geographische Mittheilungen,” part vi. 1860. 
