July 11, 1913] 



SCIENCE 



53 



firm enough to promise permanency. The in- 

 stitute would, it is expected, soon become in 

 part self-supporting. 



The writer has often been asked what rela- 

 tion this proposed bibliographical institute 

 would have to the other institutes of this 

 kind, notably the Institut International de 

 Bibliographie at Brussels, and the Interna- 

 tionales Institut fiir Sozialbibliographie, and 

 allied institutions, at Berlin. The answer is 

 that it would supplement them and, as far as 

 possible, utilize their material. The Brussels 

 institute collects titles of all kinds, from all 

 sources and of all dates, the Berlin institutes 

 collect titles from the current year on a lim- 

 ited number of sciences. The institute which 

 the writer proposes would have for its object 

 to collect titles from all sources and of all 

 dates on a definite number of subjects, con- 

 cerning which information is actually wanted. 



If anybody who reads the above should be 

 willing to assist in any way in furthering the 

 interest of bibliographical research along the 

 lines suggested, he should communicate with 

 the undersigned. 



Aksel G. S. Josephson, Chairman, 

 Committee on Research Institute 



The John Ckee.\r Library, 

 Chicago 



SCIENTIFIC BOOKS 

 Elements of Physics. By E. H. Hall. Henry 



Holt & Co. Pp. 570. 

 A First Course in Physics. By Millikan and 



Gale. Revised version. Ginn & Co. Pp. 



430. 

 Applied Physics for Secondary Schools. By 



V. D. Hawkins. Longmans, Green & Co. 



Pp. 196. 



In a new text which may be looked on as a 

 successor to Hall and Bergen's " Textbook of 

 Physics," Professor Hall has incorporated 

 many changes which have been suggested by 

 discussions carried on in Science and in meet- 

 ings of the American Association for the 

 Advancement of Science. These changes are 

 seen in the arrangement and treatment of 

 mechanics and they tend toward the simpli- 



fication of that subject. Mechanics is treated 

 more fully in this text than in other elemen- 

 tary texts. The author has attempted to 

 make the subject of the text deal with the 

 experiences of the every-day life of the stu- 

 dent. He has done this without introducing 

 material and illustrations intended to make 

 the book self-advertising, material which now 

 figures in a number of texts. For this the 

 text is to be commended. 



The criticisms which many teachers will 

 make are: that the text is much too full of 

 details, that general principles do not stand 

 out, and that the treatment is at times too 

 didactic. How many students beginning 

 physics are apt to understand or become en- 

 thused over this sentence on page 401, " Two 

 conductors are said to be at the same elec- 

 trical potential when the potential energy of 

 a quantity of electricity on one is just as 

 great as the potential energy of an equal 

 quantity of electricity on the other, so that 

 there is no flow of electricity from one to the 

 other when they are connected by a con- 

 ductor " ? This is an unnecessarily heavy 

 statement. 



In attempting to bring in matter connected 

 with the every-day life of the student the text 

 has been burdened with detail. Its five hun- 

 dred and seventy pages (seventy of which deal 

 with laboratory exercises) may be regarded as 

 encyclopedic for an elementary student. 



The well-known and widely-used elementary 

 text by Millikan and Gale has been revised, 

 shortened by sixty pages, and improved in 

 treatment. It is still, in its numerous details, 

 a comprehensive text for elementary students, 

 but it is interesting, original and up to date 

 in subject matter. The authors aim to do 

 away with the didactic method, yet in some of 

 their abbreviated statements of general prin- 

 ciples they do not accomplish this aim. To 

 give only one example; in the deduction of 

 the formula giving the object distance and 

 image distance from a lens, they are content 

 to state that a lens changes the curvature of 

 a wave-front always by the same amount. 

 This statement must appear an arbitrary one 

 to a student, but had it been led up to by a 



