454 
would suggest for the consideration of the 
Society for the Promotion of Engineering 
Education the following partial improvement 
in the method of requests for desk copies: 
1. All requests for desk copies to be sent to 
the publishers only by the deans of colleges, 
and not directly by individual teachers or 
heads of departments. This would insure 
more justice, uniformity and dignity. 
2. All free copies to remain the permanent 
property of the college, and not of individual 
teachers. This will reduce the number of 
requests to a reasonable amount. 
3. Whenever possible, teachers and colleges 
ought to purchase books and avoid asking for 
complimentary copies. 
VY. KARAPETOFF 
CoRNELL UNIVERSITY 
SCIENTIFIC BOOKS 
Melanesians and Polynesians; Their Life His- 
tories Described and Compared. By 
Grorce Brown, D.D. London, MacMillan 
& Co. 1910. Pp. 451, 70 illustrations. 
Price, $3.00. 
The work is a comparative study of two 
groups of mankind generally supposed to have 
next to nothing in common. The relation- 
ship of these groups, however, has been main- 
tained by some students since the epoch-ma- 
king explorations ‘of Wallace, who considered 
the Pacific peoples as variants of one race. 
Mr. Brown’s theory, based principally on the 
languages concerned, in which he is an au- 
thority, is that a Negrito substratum form- 
erly occupied the East Indies as far west as 
Borneo, also the continental skirts, and this 
stock became diluted by infusion of blood from 
India. Later the pressure of Malay tribes 
drove them out into the Pacific, the Poly- 
nesians having the greatest admixture of a 
light brown stock drifting to some point of 
radiation, perhaps Manua of the Samoan 
group, and the Melanesians, retaining more 
of the blood of the original black inhabitants, 
dispersed to the islands where they live at 
present. The Melanesians are thus regarded 
as the older, less commingled stock. 
His long residence in New Britain and 
SCIENCE 
[N.S. Vou. XXXV. No. 899 
Samoa and his command of the native lan- 
guages fit Mr. Brown especially for the work 
and his opinions are entitled to great respect. 
The intention to establish by comparison the 
cultural affiliation of the dusky and fair- 
brown peoples has produced a most interesting 
and valuable body of observations charmingly 
presented in clear English, not only a contri- 
bution to science in the way of an almost 
unique comparative study, but a non-contro- 
versial book well worth reading for general in- 
formation. 
Water Hove 
Herpetology of Missouri. By Juxius Hurter, 
Sr., Curator, Academy of Science of St. 
Louis, Mo. Pp. 215; 12 pl. relating to 
structural characteristics. 
There haye been various resumés of the 
fauna of states, these publications of more or 
less economic value, but it is genuinely pleas- 
ing to note the appearance of the present work 
in which it is evident throughout that the au- 
thor has devoted much labor and time in pre- 
senting a detailed and practical review. A 
publication like this stands as a fine example 
of what should be forthcoming from other 
workers on local fauna. Carefully systema- 
tized it also treats those economic features 
which greatly enlarge the field of usefulness. 
Too many of our local scientific workers de- 
vote a great amount of time and space to the 
treatment of synonyms, forgetting that this 
phase of their subject is of absolutely no in- 
terest to the great mass of readers, eagerly . 
awaiting the zoological history of their home 
territory. 
The farmer, the natural science teacher 
and the younger student will find Mr. Hurter’s 
work of immediate and practical interest, 
_ while the technical descriptions are sufficiently 
elaborate to properly identify any of the 
species. There is a series of well-prepared 
plates relating to the mouth characters of 
salamanders and frogs, the foot characters of 
the latter, the scalation of serpents and like 
characters. } 
Looking through the systematic arrange- 
ment, one notes several apparently recent 
