440 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XIV. No. 360 



SCIENCE: 



A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER OF ALL THE ARTS AND SCIENCES, 



PUBLISHED BY 



N. D. C. HODGES, 



47 Lafayette Place, New York. 



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Vol. XIV. 



NEW YORK, December 27, 18 



No. 360 



The Hall Air-Compressor 431 



Garbage Cremation 432 



A New Process of protecting 

 Iron Effectually against 

 Corrosion 432 



Supposed Showers of Meteorites 

 IN THE Desert of Atacama... 433 



The Pulsion Telephone 434 



Health Matters. 



Preventive Inoculation for Yellow- 

 Fever 435 



Antipyrine Habit 435 



CONTENTS 



Hygie 



d Sunday 436 



Italian Sausages 436 



Notes and News 436 



Book-Reviews. 

 A Text-Book of Animal Physiology 440 

 The Lost Inca 440 



Among THE Publishers 440 



Letters to the Editor. 

 Is Man Left-Legged 



Richard Oiven 442 

 On Physical Fields A. E. Dolbear 442 

 The Waters of the Great Salt Lake 



James E. Tahnage 444 



BOOK-REVIEWS. 



A Text-Book of Animal Physiology. By Wesley Mills. New 

 York, Appleton. 8°. 



Up to the present time no work on physiology has been written 

 which has been based on the comparative method. Hardly a book 

 which treats of zoology has been published, within recent years, 

 but has this method as a foundation. The book before us is an at- 

 tempt on the part of the author to do for physiology what has al- 

 ready been done for morphology. In his preface he calls attention 

 to an error which is found in too many works on human physi- 

 ology, — the application to man of conclusions which have been 

 deduced from experiments on lower animals. That this is thor- 

 oughly illogical goes without saying, and yet many writers of physi- 

 ological te.xt-books constantly err in this direction. 



Professor Mills commences his treatment of the subject with the 

 consideration of general biology, describing the cell, both animal 

 and vegetable, and then passing on to unicellalar, parasitic, and 

 multicellular organisms. The origin of the forms of life finds a 

 place in the author's plan for a concise and yet sufficiently exten- 

 sive statement of the arguments of evolution. Reproduction, which 

 is usually left until the last subject for consideration, is taken up 

 early for discussion, and this portion of the work is one of the best. 

 The general treatment of special physiology is excellent. The 

 " summary " which is found at the conclusion of each subject 

 treated is a most valuable addition. Especially worthy of com- 



mendation is the table of contents, than which we do not remem- 

 ber ever to have seen one more full or more convenient for refer- 

 ence. The five hundred illustrations are well selected and admira- 

 bly executed. As a whole, this text-book will be acceptable to all 

 teachers and students of physiology, and, as it contains matter not 

 found in any book on the subject which has as yet appeared, no 

 other can take its place. It certainly deserves the name of being 

 unique, especially in the plan upon which it is written. 



The Lost Inca. A Tale of Discovery in the Vale of the I?iti- 

 Mayte. By the Inca-Pancho-Ozollo. New York, Cas- 

 sell. 12°. 



This is a pleasing novel by a writer evidently possessed of more 

 genius than art, who hides his identity behind a pseudonyme, aijd 

 makes himself the hero of his own story. The scene is laid in the 

 Peru of the present, geographically modified to meet the demands 

 of the occasion, and the action is a curious blending of the past 

 with the present, and the possibilities of the future. Peru is a land 

 rich in romantic traditions, which are lifted from the realm of fic- 

 tion by the evidences of her antiquities ; and it is strange that 

 novelists, to whom these traditions should be suggestive and fruit- 

 ful material, have so long neglected them. 



The writer of this novel, who has evidently travelled in Peru, and 

 given some attention to its antiquities and traditions, bases his 

 work upon the mysterious disappearance of Manco-Capac, the last 

 of the Incas, from the presence of his conquerors, as detailed by 

 Prescott in his " Conquest of Peru." In working out his plot, the 

 author sometimes outdoes Jules Verne in his inventions, though 

 his evident lack of patient attention to details, so characteristic of 

 that author, leads him into blunders that will furnish mirth to his- 

 torians, engineers, and electricians. For instance, he travels on the 

 Mollendo and Pufio Railroad some three years before the contract 

 for its construction was signed. Reaching Lake Titicaca, he em- 

 barks on a flat-bottomed, stern-wheel steamboat, constructed some 

 time previously, under his own supervision, at Wilmington on the 

 Delaware. One of the peculiar features of this boat is that the en- 

 gines are located on the upper deck, amidships. Besides the en- 

 gines, she was provided with electric motors, " served by six im- 

 mense storing batteries disposed symmetrically on both sides the kel- 

 son." These batteries are charged by the " economical utilization of 

 the nearly constant north-east winds of the lake, which generated 

 electricity by means of machinery designed for the purpose." 

 This was in 1865. But these are only slight flaws. When the 

 author reaches the hidden fastnesses of the Lost Inca's ideal king- 

 dom, all is beyond criticism. Here Verne, Bellamy, and Henry 

 George seem to have combined forces in an attempt to improve on 

 More's Utopia, and the result might furnish suggestions to Edison 

 as an inventor and to IngersoU as a reformer. The book is cer- 

 tainly interesting and edifying, if not instructive. 



AMONG THE PUBLISHERS. 



Among the contents of Outing for January, we note " Wabun 

 Anung," a tale of sport in the Great Lake region, by F. Houghton ; 

 " The Merits and Defects of the National Guard," by Lieut. W. R. 

 Hamilton (second paper) ; " Gymnastics for Ladies," by W. G. 

 Anderson, M.D. ; "Fly-catcher," a tale of the hunt cup, by Hawley 

 Smart ; " Brant Shooting on Smith's Island," by Alexander Hun- 

 ter ; " Haak Fishing off Ireland's Eye," by Robert F. Walsh ; 

 " Alligator Shooting in Florida," by J. M. Murphy ; " California 

 Winter Resorts," by C. H. Shinn ; " Ice Yachting, the Prospects of 

 the Sport," by W. W. Howard ; " Catching Frost Fish with a 

 Shot-Gun," a story of Australian sport, by Edward Wakefield ; 

 and " Instantaneous Photography," by W. I. Lincoln Adams. 



— P. Blakiston, Son, & Co., medical and scientific publishers, 

 booksellers and importers, 1012 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, will 

 publish in January " Massage and the Original Swedish Move- 

 ments : their Application to Various Diseases of the Body," a 

 manual for students, nurses, and physicians, by Kurre W. Ostrom, 

 from the Royal University of Upsala, Sweden ; a text-book on 

 mental diseases, having special reference to the pathological as- 

 pects of insanity, by Bevan Lewis, medical director. West Riding 



