NOVEMBEE 6, 1896.] 



SCIENCE. 



689 



working in us a certain great degeneracy. 

 Science has bred in us a spirit of experiment 

 and a contempt for the past. * * * We have 

 made a perilous mistake in giving it too great a 

 preponderance in method over every other 

 branch of study. ' ' — Professor Woodrow Wilson, 

 in the official oration at the Princton Sesquicen- 

 tennial. ' 'Religious themes must be discussed in a 

 scientific spirit and according to scientific princi- 

 ples." — President Patton in the official sermon. 

 Bacteriology is probably the newest of the 

 sciences, but germs and animalculse have for 

 centuries been regarded as possible causes of 

 disease. The Lancet makes the following 

 curious quotation from the ' Life of A.ly 

 Pasha,' who was Governer of Janina about the 

 beginning of the century : " 'That man,' con- 

 tinued Aly, 'is one of those who see in the 

 dark. Would you believe it? He pretends 

 that the plague is composed of a vast number 

 of minute animalculae, which would be visible 

 through a magnifying glass, if one could be 

 procured of sufficient power. ' ' ' 



Appleton's Popular Science Monthly for No- 

 vember contains, as usual, a number of interest- 

 ing articles. Among them may be mentioned 

 an illustrated article by Dr. Bashford Dean re- 

 viewing the public aquariums of Europe, more 

 especially those at Naples, Amsterdam, Ply- 

 mouth, Paris, Berlin and Brighton. Prof. A. 

 S. Packard contributes an article describing an 

 ascent of of Mt. Shasta and a description of its 

 crater. Prof. Harrison Allen publishes an ad- 

 dress first delivered before the Academy of 

 Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, describing the 

 <;ontributions to natural history made by Sir 

 Thomas Brown and Sir Thomas Stanford Baf- 

 fles. Prof. W. R. Newbold continues his inter- 

 esting series of articles treating double person- 

 ality. Prof. E. 'R. Shaw urges the employ- 

 ment of motor activities in teaching, and Prof. 

 R. W. H. Hudson argues in favor of a natural 

 moral standard. There is a sketch of William 

 C. Redfield. 



Prof. F. Max Muller's translation of the 

 Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, originally issued 

 in 1881 in commemoration of the centenary of 

 its first publication, has been reprinted with al- 

 terations by The Macmillan Company. As peo- 



ple seem more inclined to read books about 

 literary and philosophical classics than the 

 classics themselves, it is gratifying to find that 

 there is a sufficient demand for a translation of 

 Kant to warrant a new reprint in America. 

 This must mean that there are many who read 

 Kant, for it may be assumed that the great 

 majority of those who care to read his works at 

 all prefer to do this in the original. Prof. Max 

 Miiller has a perfect command of both German 

 and English and effaces himself in the trans- 

 lation, not overburdening the text with 

 philosophical or bibliographical notes. Kant 

 was himself a man of science as well as a meta- 

 physican, and while students of science are 

 likely to find a certain in substantiality in his 

 Critiques, no one can read and understand them 

 without securing a firmer foothold and a 

 clearer outlook. 



The Open Court Publishing Company is per- 

 forming a real service to science and philosophy 

 by publishing, in excellent typography and at 

 a low price, reprints of standard works. The 

 last volume issued in the series, which is pub- 

 lished bi-monthly at a yearly subscription price 

 of $1.50, contains the English translation of 

 Prof. Ernst Mach's Popular Scientific Lectures. 

 Prof. Mach is one of those leaders in science 

 who, like Helmholtz and Huxley, regards it as 

 part of his service to interest the general public 

 in scientific questions. These lectures when 

 delivered must have attained their end to an 

 unusual degree. As reprinted they are of 

 somewhat unequal merit. So much progress 

 has been made in physiological optics and 

 acoustics during the past thirty years that 

 lectures on these subjects written in the sixties 

 are somewhat out of date. The polemic 

 against the classics seems extreme. A judicial 

 adjustment of claims is not forwarded by speak- 

 ing of the ' narrow provinciality of mind ' of the 

 Greeks, or of ' Aristotle with his incapacity to 

 learn from facts.' On the other hand, several 

 of the lectures, such as the one on 'The 

 Economic Nature of Physical Inquiry,' contain 

 important contributions to scientific method. 



We take from the foreign journals the fol- 

 lowing details of the life of Moritz Schiff, whose 

 death was recorded in the last number of this 



