or 
Xe) NATURE 
[JuLy 18, 1912 
how this new development illustrates the interna- 
tional character of science. Apart from Abel, the 
Norwegian, the pioneers are respectively an Italian 
and a Swede; the bibliographies supply us with 
names of Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, Jews, 
Poles, Russians, Swedes, and Englishmen, not to 
mention others. Prof. Lalesco is a Roumanian; the 
obviously missing nations are Greece and Spain 
and the South American republics. In every sense 
the prizes go to the scientific peoples; is it not 
time for Greece and Spain to enter the lists? 
G. B. M. 
REGIONAL GEOGRAPHY. 
Grundziige der physischen Erdkunde. By Prof. 
A. Supan. Futnfte Auflage. Pp. x+970+ 
20 maps. (Leipzig: Veit and Co., 1911.) 
Price 18 marks. 
“1 HE fourth edition of Prof. Supan’s text-book 
was published in 1908, and the call for a 
new issue shows that it maintains its place as 
one of the standard international authorities on 
physical geography. The new edition is mainly 
a reprint of its predecessor, but it has been care- 
fully revised, and has been increased by sixty 
pages and eighteen additional figures. Amongst 
other changes is a new morphological map of the 
world, which shows the increasing influence of 
the views of Prof. Suess. The classification of 
the lands is simpler than that of the map which 
it has replaced. 
Prof. Supan divides the world into three main 
divisions, the Boreal and Austral groups and the 
zones of folded mountain chains. 
group includes most of North America, Greenland, 
all the British Isles except the south-western 
corner of Ireland and England south of a line 
between the estuaries of the Severn and the 
Thames, Europe as far south as the southern 
border of the European plain, and north-western 
Asia, including northern Persia and all Siberia to 
the west of the meridian of 130°. The Austral 
group includes most of South America, all Africa 
with the exception of the Atlas area, Arabia, the 
Indian peninsula, and Australia. The thire divi- 
sion comprises the great fold-mountain belts 
which form the western part of the two Americas 
and extend across the eastern hemisphere along 
the Alpine-Himalayan mountains; they widen out 
eastward to include all the eastern coastlands of 
Asia, Malaysia, and New Zealand. 
Important changes have been made in the treat- 
ment of erosion. The author adopts the term 
erosion in a wide sense, and uses it, we are glad 
to note, to include both the chemical and 
mechanical removal of material. He divides the 
mechanical action of erosion into the 
NO. 2220, VOL. 89 | 
ablation, 
The Boreal | 
| (p. Sor) as limited to a diorite massif. 
_are restricted to an Archean area which is com- 
general weathering of the surface, and corrosion, 
the process of cutting deeply into the firm rocks. 
The term corrasion is not accepted. 
For the slow movement of loose material sodden 
with water down slopes, which Dr. Gunnar 
Andersson calls solifluction, the author has intro- 
duced a new  term—“ Bodenversetzung.” The 
author discusses the questions of glacial erosion 
in more detail than in previous editions. Another 
feature of the new edition is the importance 
attached to the pene-plane, which Prof. Supan 
fully accepts and uses in the delimitation of the 
areas of fold-mountains. A’slight geological mis- 
take survives in this edition in regard to the fiord 
region of New Zealand, which is_ described 
The fiords 
posed of a varied series of metamorphic rocks. 
The new edition gives evidence of great care in 
revision and of wide acquaintance with recent 
literature. Ie Wiis (Ge 
Farmers of Forty Centuries, or Permanent Agri- 
culture in China, Korea and Japan. By Dr. 
F. H. King. Pp. ix.+441. (Madison, Wis. : 
Mrs. F. H. King, 1911.) Price 2.50 dollars. 
HIS volume is unhappily the last we shall 
get from the pen of Prof. King, for his 
lamented death took place just as the book was 
going to the press. It contains an account of the 
agriculture of China, Korea, and Japan, written 
during his travels, and illuminated by many dis- 
cussions and explanations that we had learnt to 
expect from his ripe experience and sound 
judgment. 
“We have not yet gathered up the experience 
_of mankind in the tilling of the earth,” says Dr. 
Bailey in the preface, ‘‘yet the tilling of the earth 
is the bottom condition of civilisation.” The 
Western countries find it necessary to draw for 
their sustenance on the accumulated fertility of 
virgin lands, and must inevitably be faced some 
day with the problem of living on their income 
and not on their capital. Eastern countries have 
already solved this problem: densely populated 
| as they are and long have been, they manage to 
‘soils are the loss of carbon 
draw allthey want from the soil of their own land, 
and to do so without effecting any reduction in 
its fertility. 
Three causes that lead to depletion of cultivated 
due to the evolution 
of carbon dioxide, loss of nitrogen due to the 
formation of gaseous nitrogen and of readily 
| soluble nitrates, and the losses of all substances 
carried away in the crop. The Chinese cultivator 
remedies these in two ways: he grows crops to 
