yan. lo, 1884] 



NA TURE 



235 



The second section of the vohniie is devoted to Zoology, 

 and consists of two Reports — one of them an invaluable 

 monograph by Mr. A. S. Packard, jun., on Phyllopod 

 Crustacea, recent and fossil, illustrated with thirty-nine 

 plates and a coloured map showing the zoological provinces 

 of North America. This memoir will be welcomed by all 

 who take interest in the investigation of genealogies and 

 of the history of distribution in the animal kingdom. 

 Dr. R. W. Shufeldt concludes the volume with an essay 

 on the osteology of various .American Birds, likewise 

 copiously illustrated with woodcuts and with lithograph 

 plates. 



From this outline it will be seen how well Dr. Hayden 

 has sustained to the last the character of the .Survey under 

 his charge. During his tenure of office he proved himself 

 to be endowed with rare powers of organization and ad- 

 ministration and to possess wide views of the scope of a 

 survey which, like his, was to break ground for the first 

 time in new and unknown territories. He might have 

 been simply an explorer, anxious to find out the sources 

 of rivers, the positions of passes, the heights of peaks, and 

 the trend of mountain- ranges. He might have been a 

 mere geologist, desirous of adding some thousand miles of 

 new area to formations already known or of discovering 

 formations such as have no precise parallel elsewhere. 

 He might have been only a topographer, caring chiefly 

 for the accuracy of his triangulations and levellings. He 

 might have been a botanist or zoologist, eager to add new 

 species to the known flora and fauna of the earth's sur- 

 face. In one sense Dr. Hayden was none of these ; in 

 another sense he combined the fun tions of them all. In 

 later years his executive duties appear to have left him 

 little opportunity for carrying on original research himself. 

 But he had sympathy with all the pursuits just named, 

 and had the faculty of choosing good men for prosecuting 

 them. He had force of character enough to succeed in 

 battling his way and getting his appropriations from 

 Congress, and he had the perseverance to press forward 

 his operations, keeping his fellow-labourers together and 

 publishing with their aid a series of volumes of which the 

 United States may well be proud. 



The consolidation of the various Surveys under one 

 organization was an inevitable and entirely justifiable 

 step on the part of Congress, and the United States 

 Geological .Survey could not be under more energetic and 

 skilful direction than that of its present estimable chief. 

 Major Powell, with the cooperation of such leaders in 

 geological enterprise as Mr. Gilbert, Captain Dutton, and 

 their colleagues. Nevertheless, it may be permitted to a 

 geologist on this side of the Atlantic, who looks disin- 

 terestedly but not unsympathetically upon the progress 

 of events on the other side, to express his regret that 

 it should not have been possible to find a place where 

 scope might have been afforded for the talents of one who 

 had done such good service to geology as Dr. F. V. 

 Hayden. Arch. Geikie 



OUR BOOK SHELF 

 Attraction el Gravitation d'apn's Newton. Par Mme. 



Cldmence Royer. Extracted from the Review " Philo- 



sopliie positive" Pp. 23. (Pans, 1883.) 

 It is very surprising to find what is, in most other 

 respects, a really well- written and able dissertation on 



the question of action at a distance marred at the very 

 outset by an almost inexplicable blunder. 



Madame Royer has evidently read much, and lays down 

 with great clearness the distinction between Newton's 

 Theory of Gravitation as a mode of grouping together 

 under one simple law the whole phenomena of physical 

 astronomy, and the assumption handed down from 

 old Greece, of a mutual attraction exerted upon one 

 another by any two portions of matter. She shows that 

 Newton everywhere expresses himself in the most explicit 

 terms against the notion of distance-action. But she also 

 points out the curious distinction between Newton in the 

 Principia, the pure mathematician and physicist, who 

 constructs no hypotheses and declares that the mode in 

 which gravitation is produced is one which he has not 

 been able to discover from the phenomena themselves ; 

 and Newton in his Optics, the bold speculator, who 

 discusses the possible characteristics and properties of 

 the medium by which gravitation may be produced. 



This is, on the whole, so well done that we are posi- 

 tively amazed to find the all-important property of matter, 

 Inertia, absolutely and entirely ignored. From a psycho- 

 logical point of view, the following remarks, by such a 

 writer as Madame Royer shows herself to be, are of the 

 very highest interest and curiosity : — 



" Qu'est ce en effet que la notion de masse, .si ce n'est celle 

 d'un corps Heja considere comme pesant? Un corps sans pesan- 

 teur serait-il une iiiasse? en aurait-il les proprietes mecaniques ? 

 Une masse, supposee absolument isolee dan- I'espace, aurait-elle 

 un poids? Evideiunient non, pui-que le poids ne nait que des 

 rapports de grandeur et de di>tance des masses. Dire que le 

 poids ou la masse est prop jrtionnel k la quantite de matiere ou de 

 substance, c'est aftii'mer une chose que nous lie savons pas, que 

 nous ne pouvons absolument savoir d'ancune maniere. Tout ce 

 que nous Savons c'est que, considerant des corps deja pesants, en 

 vertu de leurs relations de quantiie et de distance, leur pesanteur 

 croit en raison de ces qu.intite- et en raison inverse de ces 

 distances, sans que leurs quantiles, comme matiere, soient 

 alterees, de facon que des masses douliles out une tendance deux 

 fois plus forte a tomber I'une vers I'autre, ce qui fait qu'elles 

 s'approcht-nt en realile avec la meme vitesse [sic), et que si leur 

 distance devient moitie moindre, elles s'approchent quatre fois 

 plus vite I'uue de I'autre. 



" Maii comme I'unique moyen que nous ayons de mesurer la 

 grandeur de ces masses est de les jjeser, nous restnns dans I'im- 

 possibilile absolue de dire si des masses de meme poids, en 

 meuie relation de distance avec d'autres masses pesantes, con- 

 tiennent, oui ou non, la meme quantite de matiere." 



Evidently Madame Royer, in reading the Principia, 

 has failed to notice, not only the definition of Vis insita 

 but also, those important pendulum experiments by which 

 Newton satisfied himself of the exact proportionality of 

 weights to masses, in any one place. Here we see, in no 

 doubtful manner, the evil effects of an education in which 

 athletics have no part. No one, man or woman, who has 

 had experience of Indian clubs or of dumb-bells, could 

 for a moment doubt that we have another mode of dis- 

 tinguishing mass, besides weighing. 



Elcctrotechnisches yahrbuch von der Electroiechnischen 



Gesellschaft in Frankfurt am Main. (1883.) 

 All over Germany are springing up electrotechnical 

 societies, in emulation of those in Berlin and Vienna, 

 fulfilling a kindred part to that played in Great Britain 

 bv the much older Society of Telegraph Engineers 

 and Electricians. The volume published by the Frank- 

 fort Society — the first of its P roceedi ngs—<zon\.2^\x\i several 

 papers of interest. Amongst these may be noticed two by 

 Dr. Th. Stein of Frankfort, on the measurement of small 

 intervalsof time by the photographic electric method ; and 

 on certain modern electro-chirurgical apparatus, especially 

 modifications of the influence machine of Holtz. In the 

 first of these papers Dr. Stein describes an apparatus tor 

 photographing the pulsations of the heart, &c., as con- 

 veyed by a Marey's tambour to an apparatus which at 



