March 29, 1889.] 



SCIENCE. 



245 



— The poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes, in honor of the dinner 

 given to James Russell Lowell on his seventieth birthday, is the 

 first thing to which the readers of the April Atla7itic will turn. 

 Mr. H. C. Mervvm contributes a paper on " The People in Govern- 

 ment ; " and Mr. Samuel Sheldon answers the question " Why our 

 Science Students go to Germany." Thomas Basin, Bishop of 

 Lisieux, who suffered much at the hands of Louis XL, forms the 

 subject of an article by Mr. F. C. Lowell ; and William Cranston 

 Lawton writes entertainingly of an archaeological journey " From 

 Venice to Assos." Miss Preston continues her series of articles 

 by a paper entitled " Before the Assassination," giving an account 

 of Cicero's closing years ; and Miss Louise Imogen Guiney, under 

 the name of " An Outline Portrait," writes a pleasant sketch about 

 Lady Magdalene Herbert, mother to George Herbert. Mr. Hardy's 

 serial, " Passe Rose," is concluded ; Mr. James's " Tragie Muse " 

 is continued, and the concludmg portion of " Hannah Calline's 

 Jim " also forms part of this number. The two short stories are 

 " The King's Cup and Cake," by Sophie May, and " A Dissolving 

 View of Carrick Meagher," by George H. Jessop. Mr. Bliss Car- 

 man, the young Canadian poet, contributes a long poem, " Death 

 in April ; " and Dr. T. W. Parsons, some verses called " In 

 Eclipse." Criticisms of Renan's dramas and other recent books 

 conclude the number. 



— Sir Charles Dilke, in an article on " The Future of Russia," in 

 the Fortnightly Review for March, says, " Not only is Russia the 

 greatest military power in the world, but she is the European 

 power with the largest homogeneous population and the greatest 

 expansive force. "Territorially she has the largest empire, possess- 

 ing a vast share of the Old World ; and hers is a people full of 

 patriotic and religious spirit, and, so well disciplined that all except 

 an infinitesimal minority obey cheerfully and without question, 

 under all circumstances, whether good or evil, the will of a single 

 man. Yet, although subject to what, with our parliamentary ideas, 

 we are disposed to style ' despotism,' the Russian people are full of 

 spirit, and of those qualities which we consider specially Anglo- 

 Saxon, — ' pluck ' and ' go.' Russia has absorbed with rapidity, 

 but with completeness, the greater part of central Asia, has drawn 

 steadily nearer and nearer to our frontier, and has made herself 

 extremely popular with the people she has conquered. Her policy 

 throughout the century has been apparently fixed in object, but 

 pursued with patience ; and while there seems to be no reason to 

 suppose any probability of a speedy collision, which England will 

 do nothing to provoke, it is impossible for those who are charged 

 with the defence of India to shut their eyes to the possibilities or 

 even the probabilities of the future." 



— The February number of \\\e. American Journal of Psychology 

 opens with an interesting autobiography of a paranoiac, edited and 

 commented upon by Dr. Frederick Peterson. The writer of the 

 four-hundred-page manuscript book from which Dr. Peterson ab- 

 stracts was a farm laborer, with a turn for study (he read Latin 

 con ainore) that helped to give him a remarkably direct literary 

 style. The paper is interesting psychologically for the inside view 

 it gives of the gradual development of his mental disease. Be- 

 ginning life with hereditary predisposition, he grew up a hyper- 

 sensitive and self-conscious child, a depressed and occasionally 

 violent young man, suspicious of insult and persecution, contem- 

 plating murder in revenge, and finally reached the hallucinations 

 and delusions of a typical paranoiac. His delusions of grandeur 

 were colored by his reading of the Bible. First he found coinci- 

 dences with his own experience. By degrees he recognized these 

 less and less as coincidences, and regarded them more and more 

 as prophetic, till at last he was ready to announce himself as the 

 expounder of a new religion. His sufferings were the world's ex- 

 piation, whence the title of his book, " The Piling of Tophet and 

 the Trespass Offering." Though unable to correct his aberrations, 

 he was a keen observer of his own mind, coherent, logical, and, 

 like many of his class, not without at times a shadowy recogni- 

 tion of his true condition. The other two papers are continua- 

 tions from the last number. Dr. W. H. Burnham brings down his 

 survey of the doctrine of memory from Zanotti and his fantastic 

 explanation of the association of ideas by their " electricity and 

 magnetism," to Hering and Creighton. The theories held by the 

 disciples of Hartley, by Kant and his followers, by the Scottish 



school, by the English associationists, by the exponents of the" new 

 psychology," are all considered ; and finally, the modern theory of 

 " organic memory," the beginnings of which, it appears, are to be 

 found in Malebranche. Dr. E. C. Sanford discusses the variations 

 produced in the amount of the personal equation by the kind of the 

 heavenly body observed, by the magnitude of the star, by its rate 

 and apparent direction of motion, and by the psychic and other 

 conditions of observation. The reality of these changes seems 

 demonstrable, and the law of their cause isnot always clear. They 

 furnish rather suggestive points for physiological and psycholog- 

 ical research, than generalizations that can be taken ready-made 

 into either science. This number contains the usual abundance of 

 reviews and notes on psychological literature ; " Nervous System," 

 by Dr. H. H. Donaldson; "Hypnotism, Experimental and Ab- 

 normal," by Professor Joseph Jastrow. Rather prominent under 

 the second heading are a number of abstracts from the rapidly 

 growing literature of therapeutic hypnotism. 



— The R. S. King Publishing Company, Chicago, have in press 

 " The Story of America," by Elia W. Peattie, an historic narrative, 

 arranged especially for young people. Many of the illustrations 

 have been designed and engraved especially for this book. It is 

 intended to be used as a text-book or supplementary reader in 

 schools, as well as for general reading. 



LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 





* ^* Correspondents are reqtiested to be as brief as possible. The 

 in atlcases required as prooj" of f;ood faith. 



The editor wilt be glad to publisk any gricries consonant with the character of 

 the journal. 



Twenty copies of the number containing his communication will be furnishea 

 free to any correspondent on request. 



The Soaring of Birds. 



Since my return to Cambridge, I find that a rather extensive cor- 

 respondence has collected upon the above subject. I admit the 

 force of Mr. Gilbert's criticism on the medium with uniform mo- 

 tion, and, that being the case, need not defend the theory from the 

 criticism of Professor MacGregor, further than to say that the 

 force which he calls number (2) is not due to friction, and that he 

 has misunderstood my meaning. As the original theory, in that 

 form, is withdrawn, it is unnecessary to discuss it further in Sci- 

 ence. 



In regard to Mr. Gilbert's explanation, I must say that_ I cannot 

 yet accept his horizontal-layer theory. The very essence of a bird's 

 soaring is that he shall continually rise higher and higher, not con- 

 tinue to circle at one level. If the bird rises higher and higher, we 

 must have a succession of these layers of air, the upper ones a few 

 thousand feet from the ground moving with a velocity very much 

 higher than is usually attributed to the clouds, or else a series of 

 layers moving alternately fast and slowly, which seems to involve 

 an hypothesis which we have no other ground save this theory for 

 believing. 



Moreover, if all the bird has to do is merely to dip from one 

 moving layer of air into another, why should not small birds soar ? 

 Take the swallow, for instance, — a most excellent flier, and quite 

 capable of travelling with outstretched wings for a few seconds ; 

 yet he is never known to maintain himself in the air circling for five 

 or ten minutes at a time, or by the hour together, as do the larger 

 birds. 



But why make any new assumptions with regard to the atmos- 

 phere ? Why not take the phenomena with which we are all of us 

 familiar ? Whenever there is a high wind, such as is undoubtedly 

 required by a soaring bird, we know that the air-pressure is not 

 uniform, that the wind comes in gusts. Those familiar with moun- 

 tain summits know that the same phenomena are observed in the 

 upper atmosphere as at the surface of the ground. If we were 

 travelling along with such a wind in a balloon, the gusts would not 

 be so severe, but they would be of longer duration. 



A B 



Imagine, now, a bird travelling from A to B, in the same direc- 

 tion as the wind, and with its mean velocity. When the wind is 

 uniform, it seems to him that he is in a dead calm. When a gust 

 comes, the wind seems to blow from A. It carries him along 

 faster ; and when it ceases, the wind seems to blow from B, It 

 therefore affects him precisely as if he were in an alternating cur- 

 rent of wind. 



