328 Reviews — Nouveau Traite des Eaux Souterraines. 



veins, the origin of thermal springs, the mechanism of geysers, the 

 hygiene of potable water, the values of different colouring matters 

 in tracing currents below ground, and the claims of the water 

 diviner. To summarize the author's observations is as difficult 

 as abridging a dictionary, and in the short space allotted to this 

 notice one can exhibit a few stray specimens but hardly repre- 

 sentative samples. 



The earlier chapters are dominated by a desire to correct the 

 " errors " of German, Austrian, and Swiss " professors " — 

 Rutimeyer, Heim, Tietze, Penck, Grund — " who, without having 

 gone sufficiently to study personally the actual phenomena under- 

 ground . . . have denied the influence of fractures in the formation 

 of valleys." M. Martel " holds very strongly, not from the teaching 

 of professors, but after having undertaken in complete iadependence 

 of judgment, thirty-eight years' observations on subterranean and 

 torrential waters, that below ground, as on the surface, fractures 

 play a capital role in the formation of caverns as well as in 

 the formation of a great number of valleys." He backs his con- 

 clusions by a wealth of illustrations drawn from widely separated 

 areas, biit he does not make them more convincing by ascribing 

 other views to the influence of " German pedagogy which explains 

 the facts by the ideas, not the ideas by the facts " (pp. 66 and 67), or 

 by asserting that any conflicting theory can be held only through 

 ignorance or prejudice (p. 147). It is, of course, possible that a 

 dominant political system, artificially raised to the level of a national 

 religion, may influence the tone of a country's scientific thought, 

 but in every community there still remain individuals who desire to 

 arrive at the truth and are not wholly inhibited by nationalism. 

 To quote a number of Allied writers on other quite different subjects 

 to show that our late enemies have been dominated by " puff, 

 bluff, and pedantry " does not suggest to the neutral reader that the 

 author trusts sufficiently to the significance of the facts which he 

 quotes with laborious care and meticulous precision. 



In other matters, too, even the natural vanity of the reader might 

 be relied on to respond if the author only allowed him to discover 

 for himself, from the abundance of dated quotations, the marked 

 change which has come over the science of speleology during the 

 past thirty-eight years ; the specific references to the significance of 

 the year 1883 (e.g. on pp. 5, 147, 236, and 756) seem to be an 

 unnecessary simplification of a simple inference. Nor do the dicta 

 of a recognized master acquire additional weight by adventitious 

 forms of reinforcement, such as the use of italics and one, two, or 

 even three marks of exclamation. The author could have rested 

 more placidly on the circumstance that the penetration of truth, 

 like many other natural phenomena, is governed by the law of 

 uniformity. These by-products of enthusiasm, however, add on 

 the whole more to the human interest of the book than they detract 

 from its value as a judicial pronouncement. 



