774 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVIII. No. 987 



reader; but it serves our critic to swell the ac- 

 cumulation of details for his contention that 

 our work is careless because the same frater- 

 nity is described by the use of different words 

 in different parts of the paper. 



A critic who is guilty of such extensive 

 stupid, captious and misleading criticism can 

 hardly expect a scientific consideration of 

 other points he raises of a more general sort. 

 I fear it will be futile for a biologist to attempt 

 to show to the " applied statistician " his 

 errors. Genuine, scientific criticism has al- 

 ways been useful in the advancement of sci- 

 ence, but friends of Galton must regard it as 

 a tragedy that the fortune of one of the largest- 

 minded and most fertile-minded men of sci- 

 ence should be supporting a laboratory one of 

 whose leading members spends much time 

 making elaborate researches into his delusions 

 concerning the blunders of others instead of 

 making positive discoveries in a field where so 

 little is known and where the need of utilizable 

 knowledge is so great. 



Chas. B. Davenport 



Cold Spring Harboe, N. T., 

 November 10, 1913 



SCIENTIFIC BOOKS 

 Mineral Deposits. By Waldemar Lindgren. 



New York, McGraw-Hill Co. Pp. v -f 883, 



Figs. 257. Svo. $5.00. 



In the preparation of this invaluable trea- 

 tise a great boon has been conferred by Pro- 

 fessor Lindgren upon all geologists. The 

 work is of interest not alone to those immedi- 

 ately engaged in mining, but to all who are 

 concerned with the processes of mineral solu- 

 tion and deposition in the earth's crust. For 

 those who have not followed from year to year 

 the advances of observation and interpretation, 

 many new and striking results will appear. 



The author has brought exceptional prepa- 

 ration and experience to the task. An old 

 Freiberger, he was grounded by one of the 

 best of teachers, the late Professor A. W. 

 Stelzner, in the " Lehre " or " lore " of ore-de- 

 posits, and learned of the applications of geol- 

 ogy in the steadying atmosphere of an engi- 

 neering school. Beginning in 1883 on the 



Transcontinental Survey of the Northern Pa- 

 cific railroad, Mr. Lindgren entered the U. S. 

 Geological Survey the next year, and has thus 

 had nearly thirty years of study in the mining 

 districts of America. Journeys in Australia 

 and Europe have further amplified experience, 

 and courses of instruction given by him at 

 Stanford University and in the Massachusetts 

 Institute of Technology have served to sys- 

 tematize and formulate conclusions. To all 

 has been added a thorough scholarship and 

 spirit of fairness, such that the resulting work 

 is marked by all these characteristics. It is 

 also the ripe fruition of a little school of 

 American observers, whose views have found 

 special expression in the magazine Economic 

 Geology. 



The book is divisible into two parts. An 

 introductory one of about one fifth the total 

 embraces the general chemical and structural 

 principles on which the remainder is based. 

 The major portion is thus devoted to a review 

 and discussion of the types of mineral deposits 

 whose scheme of classification is at once the 

 climax of the first part and the skeleton of the 

 second. As the title implies, the work takes 

 up " mineral deposits " rather than " ore de- 

 posits." The title makes logical and consistent 

 the treatment both of the deposits with the 

 distinctive metals and those with non-metals. 

 It enables the author to have freer scope in 

 that questions of profitable working are less 

 involved. The title is a little over-inclusive 

 for the subject-matter, because coal, our most 

 important mineral deposit, is not mentioned, 

 although a place for it is provided in the 

 scheme of classification. Old associations 

 were probably so strong with our author that 

 coal, petroleum and natural gas faded from 

 the field of view when actually writing. 



In the introduction, water necessarily plays 

 a very important part. Six extremely interest- 

 ing chapters are devoted to it. For the greater 

 number of mineral deposits water is quite cor- 

 rectly regarded as the all-important agent. 

 Its composition, circulation, chemical reac- 

 tions and amount are all reviewed. The ques- 

 tion, may, however, be raised, whether, when 

 the general shallow penetration of the meteoric 



