JANUARY 12, 1912] 
erops, modes of handling, costs of fertiliza- 
tion, and largeness of population per unit 
area, make the book a thesaurus of its kind. 
The author, like the reviewer whose educa- 
tional studies in China ran contemporaneously 
with these agricultural ones, was impressed 
with the extent of resources still unused in the 
very regions whose overcrowded condition has 
been so common a theme of lugubrious com- 
ment. Scattered through the volume there 
are economic points of the most vital pith that 
should serve as an antidote to the pessimistic 
Jeremiads so current in these days and so 
commonly floating on very shallow waters. 
The following quotation from the final chap- 
ter on Japan, p. 425, must suffice to indicate 
the tenor of the author’s outlook on future 
possibilities: 
In 1907 there were in the [Japanese] Empire 
some 5,814,362 households of farmers tilling 15,- 
201,969 acres and feeding 3,522,877 additional 
households, or 51,742,398 people. This is an ay- 
erage of 3.4 people to the acre of cultivated land, 
each farmer’s household tilling an average of 
2.6 acres. 
The lands yet to be reclaimed are being put 
under cultivation rapidly, the amount improved in 
1907 being 64,448 acres. If the new lands to be 
reclaimed can be made as productive as those now 
in use there should be opportunity for an increase 
in population to the extent of about 35,000,000 
without changing the present ratio of 3.4 people 
to the acre of cultivated land. 
While the remaining lands to be reclaimed are 
not as inherently productive as those now in use, 
improvements in management will more than com- 
peusate for this, and the Empire is certain to 
quite double its present maintenance capacity and 
provide for at least a hundred million people with 
many more comforts of home and more satisfac- 
tion for the common people than they now enjoy. 
The soul of the book lies in its appreciative 
delineation of methods that have sufficed for 
the maintenance through many centuries of 
perhaps the highest average productivity ever 
attained by great peoples, and its chief lesson 
lies in the realization of this by simple do- 
mestic means. The style of the book is ex- 
cellent and the two hundred and forty odd 
half tones effectively illustrate the text. 
SCIENCE 73 
That this should be the last contribution of 
one who has written so much and so well is a 
source of inexpressible regret. 
T. C. CHAMBERLIN 
SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS AND ARTICLES 
Tue closing (October) number of volume 
12 of the Transactions of the American 
Mathematical Society contains the following 
papers: 
W. A. Manning: ‘‘On the limit of the degree 
of primitive groups.’’ 
G. A. Miller: ‘‘Isomorphisms of a group whose 
order is a power of a prime.’’ 
John Hiesland: ‘‘On minimal lines and con- 
gruences in four-dimensional space.’’ 
G. GC. Evans: ‘‘Volterra’s integral equation of 
the second kind, with discontinuous kernel. Sec- 
ond paper.’’ 
E. J. Wilezynski: ‘‘One-parameter families and 
nets of plane curves.’’ 
Also: ‘‘ Notes and errata, volumes 10 and 11.’’ 
Tur December number (volume 18, num- 
ber 3) of the Bulletin of the American 
Mathematical Society contains: “ A generali- 
zation of Lindeléf’s theorems on the cate- 
nary,’ by Oskar Bolza; “A note on the 
theory of summable integrals,” by S. Chap- 
man; “ Irreducible homogeneous linear groups 
of order p™ and degree p or p,” by W. B. 
Fite; Report on “Graduate work in mathe- 
matics in universities and in other institu- 
tions of like grade in the United States,” by 
the American committee of the International 
Commission on the Teaching of Mathematics; 
“Shorter Notices”: Holton’s Shop Mathe- 
matics, by C. N. Haskins; Timerding’s Die 
Mathematik in den _ physikalischen lLehr- 
biichern, and Siddons and Vassall’s Practical 
Measurements, by E. W. Ponzer; Hosmer’s 
Azimuth, by E. B. Wilson; “ Hisenhart’s Dif- 
ferential Geometry,” by G. A. Bliss; “ Note 
on collineation groups,” by H. H. Mitchell; 
“Notes”; “ New Publications.” 
Tue January number of the Bulletin con- 
tains: Report of the October meeting of the 
society, by F. N. Cole; Report of the October 
meeting of the San Francisco Section, by T. M. 
Putnam; “ The Carlsruhe meeting of the Ger- 
man Mathematical Society,” by Virgil Snyder; 
