82 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVI. No. 916 



striated ends appear to be bounded by h, m 

 and Ti, as well as other faces. 



I am now wondering bow commonly sucb 

 coatings are aragonite rather than calcite. 

 Alfred C. Lane 

 Tufts College, Mass., 

 June 18, 1912 



SCIENTIFIC BOOKS 



Theoretical and Physical Chemistry. By S. 

 Lawrence Bigelow, Ph.D., Professor of 

 General and Physical Chemistry in the Uni- 

 versity of Michigan. New York, The Cen- 

 tury Co. 1912. 14X22 cm. Pp. siii-f 

 544. Price $3.00. 



In his preface, the author points out that, 

 after gaining some knowledge of the facts in 

 the first year or two's study of chemistry, stu- 

 dents are ready to find botk profit and pleasure 

 in a more philosophical study of generaliza- 

 tions and principles than was possible at an 

 earlier stage. Truly, the modem beginners' 

 course in general chemistry, although it is in 

 part descriptive and detailed, yet fully de- 

 serves the appelation " general " in Ostwald's 

 sense, and might well have served for a course 

 in physical chemistry some fifteen years ago 

 (p. 4). Selecting the generalizations from the 

 masses of details accumulated in all the spe- 

 cial branches of chemistry, however, " our 

 subject makes a specialty of these generaliza- 

 tions," and therefore stands to chemistry in 

 the same reiation as philosophy does to all 

 sciences. Instead of " Theoretical and Phys- 

 ical Chemistry," the book might, indeed, have 

 well been entitled " The Philosophy of Chem- 

 istry," if for no other reason because of the 

 catholic and philosophic viewpoint of its 

 author. After reading his prefatory acknowl- 

 edgments to his former teachers Ostwald and 

 Nernst, one looks rather for Germanic philos- 

 ophy; but what one finds is Anglo-Saxon. 

 For those who require to have this distinction 

 characterized for purposes of physical science 

 it may be stated, with Duhem, that the Anglo- 

 Saxon temperament wishes to construct a 

 tangible model of sticks and strings, while the 

 Germanic carries the logic to its necessary 

 conclusion, however unfathomable. 



In regard to the subjects treated, any criti- 

 cisms as to omissions is disarmed by the state- 

 ment that " the most difficult part of the task 

 has been the selection of topics to omit." In 

 spite of well-chosen omissions, however, a very 

 wide field is nevertheless covered, lightly, often 

 with elegance and always with clearness. The 

 titles of some of the thirty chapters which 

 the book contains are as follows: The Scien- 

 tific Method; Fundamental Definitions; Unit 

 Quantities of Chemistry and Chemical Nota- 

 tion ; Chemical Energy, Affinity and Valence ; 

 Spectroscopic Evidences and the Theory of 

 Inorganic Evolution; Luminiferous Ether and 

 Vortex Eings ; Eadioactivity and the Electron 

 Theory; Solid Solutions; Colloidal Solutions; 

 Liquefaction of Gases; Some Elementary 

 Thermodynamic Deductions ; Actinochem- 

 istry. In an elementary text, beaten tracks 

 have, in the main, to be followed, for " classi- 

 fications and methods of presentation which 

 have proved satisfactory by their results should 

 not be tampered with unless for clearly good 

 cause. My colleagues will therefore recognize 

 many familiar statements and arrangements 

 in the following pages "—which remark again 

 disarms criticism of the author, at least, for 

 an occasional misstatement. Examples of the 

 side-heads to paragraphs may serve to show 

 that the topics selected for treatment are not 

 by any means identical with those common to 

 other similar text-books; such side-heads are: 

 Relativity Principle, Table of Energies and 

 their Factors, Landolt's Experiments, Signifi- 

 cance of Valence, Archimedes Spiral [of the 

 elements], Protyle, Emission of Light and 

 Temperature, Stefan's Law, Bolometer, Proto- 

 elements, Zeeman Effect, Canal Rays, The 

 Value of e/m, Stokes' Law, Siendentopf and 

 Zsigmondy's Results, Brownian Movement, 

 Kundt's Method, " Etch Figures," Agglutina- 

 tion, Three Ways to Damage a Storage Cell, 

 etc. The paragraph on page 141 on the de- 

 duction of Avogadro's theory might, by the 

 way, be omitted or modified in the light of 

 Rayleigh's note on page 326 of Maxwell's 

 " Heat." 



After ^1, the manner, in an elementary text, 

 is perhaps even more important than the mat- 



