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NATURE 
[March 3, 1870 
THE THREE KINGDOMS OF NATURE 
The Three Kingdoms of Nature, briefly described. By 
the Rey. S. Haughton, F.R.S., M.D. Dubl., D.C.L. 
Oxon, &c. (London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin.) 
Pes little work resembles a modern novel in one 
particular ; it is written with an idea. 
The learned author, in his preface, lays down the law 
that “the faculties of our mind are developed in succes- 
sion as we advance in age, each of them reaching its 
maximum and then gradually diminishing. In childhood 
the senses acquire their greatest development ; in boy- 
hood and youth, the memory and imagination ; in early 
manhood, the purely reasoning faculties; and in adult life, 
the judgment.” He accordingly draws the conclusion that 
“the child should be instructed mainly through his sensa- 
tions; the boy should learn languages, ancient and modern, 
and natural history, so far as it depends on observation ; 
the youth should cultivate mathematics and logic ; while 
studies such as ethics, physiology, and politics should be 
reserved for the more mature period of life:” and offers 
this work as a text-book on Natural History. 
We must confess that the above law seems to us to be 
barely a half-truth. We admit that the senses are rela- 
tively strongest in childhood, but not absolutely. So far 
from their attaining their maximum development at that 
age, and then gradually diminishing, we believe that the 
senses of the truly fashioned man are at their height 
when he is in the prime of life; and that in the properly 
trained man, memory, imagination, reason, and judgment, 
all flourish at the same time. 
We are apt to forget into what a wretchedly cramped 
and artificial condition so many generations of school- 
masters have bred us. Each of us, generation after 
generation, has very early been made to put Chinese shoes 
on most of the feet of his mind. 
We all see the sportive, elastic, quick, sharp, unwearying 
work of the senses of a little child. We do not all of us bear 
in mind to how fearful an extent those senses are bruised 
and deadened by the pedantry of our pedagogues. Men 
who cultivate those sciences in which success is inseparable 
from agile sense, know at what cost and labour, in later 
life, sometimes even in their full prime, they have had to 
go back and undo all that their schoolmasters have done, 
have had to become little children again for the sake of a 
sharper eye and a quicker ear. To ourselves, there is 
nothing more disheartening than to study a little boy, of 
eight or ten years of age, who has never been to school, 
tracing out in his mind with ease nascent scientific capa- 
bilities ; then to know the same little boy after he has 
enjoyed for two or three years the great advantages 
of a grammar or a commercial school, or a_ private 
academy, and to find his mind as blank and as deadened 
as his moral nature. 
We do not feel inclined, then, to accept the physiological 
law laid down by Dr. Haughton, but we are not thereby 
prevented from agreeing with him that “ Natural History 
(as a school study) is inferior to no other study, not even 
language, as a means of cultivating the memory and 
observation,” or from accepting his brief description of the 
three kingdoms as a capital instrument of teaching. 
The first part contains, besides an introductory and 
extremely lucid chapter on Crystallography, a detailed 
but succinct description of the various minerals found in 
Nature; the chemical composition, physical characters, 
crystalline forms, geological and geographical distribution 
of each being briefly given. 
The second part treats of the Vegetable kingdom ; 
dealing somewhat fully with the anatomy, more briefly 
with the physiology, of plants, and devoting ‘only some 
dozen pages or so to classification. 
The third part, comprising nearly half the volume, 
describes the Animal kingdom, beginning with mammalia 
and working down to protozoans. In each subdivision a 
brief anatomical history precedes the classification, which 
is given pretty fully. Formal definitions in italics, of 
classes and orders, are relieved by popular descriptions of 
the habits and features of species and individuals ; and 
the whole work is largely illustrated by many excellent 
woodcuts. 
Although so large a field is gone over, the matter is on 
the whole eminently exact and truthful ; and the author 
has probably given an indication of the judgment of the 
mature period, by hesitating to place in a dogmatic text- 
book views on various points which are certainly recent, 
and may turn out to be raw. We may congratulate Dr. 
Haughton on having compressed a vast amount of in- 
formation into a small compass. But is only right to add 
one more observation: the book is very formal, even to 
exceeding toughness. Though quotations from the poets, 
Aristotle, and Scripture appear here and there, the general 
reader would, we fear, find it very dry. As a text-book in 
the hands of a teacher, it will commend itself to every 
one ; we doubt if any but very strong-minded persons 
would choose it for self-instruction, except with the fear 
of an examination before them, M. F. 
OUR BOOK SHELF 
Baillon’s Czsalpinee.—/Histoive des Plantes :—Mono- 
graphie des Legumineuses Cesalpinées, Par H. 
Baillon. (Paris: Hachette, 1569. London : 
Williams and Norgate.) 
WE have so rxecently reviewed the first volume of Baillon’s 
“ History of Plants” (see NATURE, No 2, p. 52) and 
discussed his mode of treating the subject, that we 
need scarcely more than mention the publication of his 
monograph of the important order or sub-order of 
Cesalpinee. The boundary-line between this sub-order 
and the Papilionacee is very difficult to be accurately laid 
down. M. Baillon describes the Cesalpinee to be, in 
general terms, those Legwminose which have a straight 
embryo and the eestivation not vexillary in the bud; but 
neither of these diagnostics can be relied on as absolutely 
constant. All the other characters dependent on the 
regularity or irregularity of the corolla, the cohesion of 
the stamens, the number of seeds, the presence or absence 
of albumen, &c., are still more uncertain. There are 
even species so far removed from the normal type of the 
order as to have undivided leaves, indefinite stamens, 
diclinous flowers, and herbaceous stems. A. W. B. 
Ueber die Fortpflanzungs-Geschwindighett des Schalles tn 
Rohren. Von Adolf Seebeck. (Géttingen, 1869.) 
IN this inaugural dissertation, Herr A. Seebeck, the 
inheritor of a name famous in physical science, gives an 
account of his experiments on the velocity of the propa- 
gation of sound in pipes. The results are extremely 
interesting and important. 
In 1867, Professor Kundt, of Zurich, proved that the 
velocity of sound in pipes depends on their cross section, 
and attributed the result to the loss of heat in the friction 
