AUGUST 27, 1897. ] 
AN explosion occurred recently in a labora- 
tory at Saint Michael-de-Maurienne, where car- 
bide of calcium was being manufactured. The 
building was destroyed and one workman was 
killed and three others were seriously injured. 
THE unpublished journals of the great nat- 
uralist Audubon, written in French, are being 
translated for publication in English by his 
granddaughter, Miss Maria Audubon. 
Ginn & Co. announce that they will publish 
at once ‘Stories of Insect Life,’ by Professor 
Clarence M. Weed, of the New Hampshire 
College of Agriculture and Mechanical Arts. 
The book is designed to give information to the 
child regarding the lives of the insects, and to 
stimulate pupils to fuller observation of insects 
out-of-doors. 
THE trustees of the Boston Public Library 
have authorized the publication, in their bulle- 
tins, of an exhaustive ‘ Bibliography on the An- 
thropology and Ethnology of Europe,’ prepared 
by Professor William Z. Ripley, of the Massa- 
chussetts Institute of Technology, lecturer in 
anthropo-geography at Columbia University. 
This list of references will include about 1,500 
titles, taken in every instance from the original 
sources. It embodies the raw materials of the 
papers on the Racial Geography of Europe now 
appearing in successive numbers of the Popular 
Science Monthly, afterward to be published in 
book form. Every precaution has been taken 
to insure completeness and accuracy ; most of 
the living authorities will have corrected and 
supplemented the lists of their own works in 
proof. The bibliographical systems of Minot 
and Wilson will be employed, with a complete 
subject index. A special feature will be the 
reference to original maps, whether linguistic, 
somatological or ethnographical. It is worthy 
of note that practically all of the titles in this 
recent field of investigation are upon the 
shelves of the Boston Library, proof positive 
of the possibilities for research from original 
sources which are now afforded by our great 
American collections. 
WE are glad to welcome a new edition of the 
‘Dynamic Sociology,’ of Professor Lester F. 
Ward, published by the Appletons. The first 
edition, issued in 1883, was very fully reviewed 
SCIENCE. 
321 
in four articles included in the second yolume 
of this JOURNAL, and no material changes have 
been made in the present edition. There is 
much to be said for not attempting to recast a 
work that represents a given epoch in the his- 
tory of a new science. The further develop- 
ment of the author’s views on psychology have 
been given expression in a separate volume 
(the ‘ Psychic Factors of Civilization,’ 1893), and 
this is a better plan than re-writing a standard 
book. An interesting preface to this edition of 
the ‘Dynamic Sociology’ notes that fourteen 
years ago, when the work was first published, the 
word sociology was used but rarely; there were 
but few books on the science, no journals, and 
no university chairs. Now all is changed; the 
word ison the lips of everyone, and the science, 
if given as wide a range as Professor Ward’s 
book, bids fair, as he says, to become the lead- 
ing science of the twentieth century. The 
preface gives some account of the suppression 
of the Russian translation of the book, which 
was widely commented on in the daily papers 
several years ago. The suggestion is made 
that the title suggested socialism and dynamite 
to the Council of Ministers, a very dangerous 
combination from their point of view. <A Polish 
translation appears also to have been suppressed, 
but four Russian translations of the ‘ Psychic 
Factors of Civilization’ haye been made. 
PROFESSOR BAILEY’s ‘Principles of Fruit 
Growing’ (The Macmillan Co) is both practical 
and scientific. As all that the author writes 
—and it is not little—the book is worth read- 
ing, both by the practical gardener and by the 
student. After an introduction covering the 
kinds of fruits, the geography of fruit growing 
and its methods, chapters are devoted to loca- 
tion and climate, the tillage of fruit lands, their 
fertilization, their planting and their care, fol- 
lowed by chapters on disease and insects, and 
on harvesting and marketing.. Professor Bailey 
makes many acute remarks, as when he calls 
spraying ‘insurance’ and gives as one of its 
uses ‘waking up the horticulturist.’ This vol- 
ume is the fifth in this ‘Rural Science Series,’ 
edited by the author of this volume, which has 
fulfilled the promise of the publishers to be 
‘readable, simple, clear-cut, practical, up-to- 
date, and thoroughly scientific and reliable.’ 
