28 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVIII. No. I 



they are far in the heart of the gulf, away 

 from any recent entanglement with the main- 

 land, which is not quite so true of Prince 

 Edward Island. Here is a cluster of rock 

 fragments knit together by sand bars which 

 show no single trace or semblance of recent 

 elevation or depression. Even the broad dune- 

 covered bars patched with stunted spruce and 

 dune-grass afford no indication of tree burial 

 or poisoning by encroachment of the water 

 without or of the great lagoons within. The 

 rocks of the islands are rather homogeneous 

 in quality, except for the volcanics. The 

 sandstones are retreating rapidly under the 

 wave attacks, and while the volcanics stand 

 out in better resistance, the broad submarine 

 platform about the islands is uniformly 

 smoothed. The soundings of the admiralty 

 chart show how uniform the smoothing has 

 been. The five-fathom platform ties all the 

 islands of the Magdalens proper into one. 

 The walrus bones heaped together on the top 

 of the low horizontal rock shelves where they 

 were left by the hunters more than a century 

 ago, lie as they lay then, only coated with a 

 century of soil and quietly falling away into 

 the sea as the waters gnaw down the rocks. 

 The five-fathom level is approximately a true 

 wave platform, but the ten-fathom level, which 

 outlines a platform of a hundred times the 

 present superficies of the surviving islands, is 

 unquestionably a wave-cut level deeply sub- 

 merged. In this ten-fathom level there is no 

 appeal from the evidence of a submergence at 

 a time not far back of the present or from the 

 conclusion that the Magdalens are mere inter- 

 woven shreds of a once great island, but we 

 must not be pressed to declare how long ago 

 the negative movement ceased. Not long, 

 probably; but for this day, this present, we 

 lack the right to say that there is any move- 

 ment in process, up or down. A clue is sug- 

 gested as to the length of this actual stability ; 

 facing the great interior lagoon bounded by 

 the double chain of sand bars are ragged rock 

 cliffs, with bare faces that never could have 

 been torn by the feeble waters of the lagoon 

 even in times of tempest. These cliffs, now 

 enmeshed by sand and facing only placid 



waters, were made ragged and bare in the 

 days when the sea itself pounded at their base. 

 Since then the whole network of sand has been 

 built up about them, and yet all this without 

 any definite indication of change of water 

 level. 



John M. Clarke 



Einfuhrung in die Maihematih fiir Biologen 

 und Chemileer. Von Professor Dr. Leonor 

 MiCHAELis, Privatdozent an der Universitat 

 Berlin. Verlag von Julius Springer, Berlin. 

 1912. 



It is the purpose of this book to bring be- 

 fore the chemist and the biologist, in con- 

 venient form, some mathematical information 

 that is necessary to an understanding of 

 methods that are being used more and more 

 in chemistry and biology. The first chapter 

 of the book gives a recapitulation of some 

 very elementary mathematics, including plane 

 geometry, the most elementary algebra and 

 trigonometry. The second chapter is given to 

 the study of some very simple functions such 

 as are usually treated in a first course in 

 analytic geometry. The main part of the 

 book is given to the calculus, to differential 

 equations, and to applications to chemistry 

 and physics. 



The author has succeeded in bringing a 

 large amount of useful material into a small 

 space, and the book will perhaps serve well its 

 purpose. Although the reviewer recognizes 

 that, in an elementary book, one may sacrifice 

 too much simplicity for the sake of precision 

 in the statement of fundamentals, there is 

 some danger that the chemist and biologist 

 wiU get incorrect views as to the precision of 

 the processes of differentiation and integra- 

 tion when presented as they are in this book. 

 To illustrate, on p. 107, we find the statement 

 . dx dx 



and analogous statements are to be found at 

 many points in the book. 



I note the following numerical and typo- 

 graphical errors: Line 23, p. 37, should con- 

 tain 0.7071 instead of 0.7069, and line 9, 

 p. 107, should have 



