December 14, 1888.] 



SCIENCE. 



295 



following brief summary from Hirsch : " Phthisis is everywhere 

 prevalent, but is rare in polar regions, and rarer still at great alti- 

 tudes. The main factor in its production is overcrowding and bad 

 hygiene. Heat and cold, per se, have no influence. Damp, when 

 conjoined with frequent oscillations of temperature, predisposes to 

 the disease ; but humidity of the air is less important than damp- 

 ness of the soil. Occupation is extremely important, but mainly in- 

 directly, as tending to good or bad hygienic conditions." With 

 reference to the part played by the tubercle bacillus, Dr. Evans 

 says it is reasonable to believe that it holds the saine etiological 

 relation to pulmonary phthisis that certain other micro-organisms 

 hold to external surgical affections, to septic diseases of the (post- 

 partum) uterus or its contiguous tissues, etc. He thinks that there 

 can be no doubt that pulmonary phthisis occasionally terminates in 

 recovery, and refers to cases reported by competent observers in 

 which such a result has followed. He believes that the respiration 

 of antiseptic air by phthisical subjects will be found in the future 

 to be as successful in the treatment of consumption as topical anti- 

 septic influences have been in the treatment of external surgical 

 affections. ' 



Although Dr. Evans states in the preface that his treatise is 

 made up, to a great extent, of the observations of others, and for 

 the most part in their own words, still he deserves great credit for 

 the admirable manner in which he has arranged the material, and 

 for the excellent judgment displayed in selecting from the writings 

 of others all that is most valuable, and pertinent to the subject. 



The Story of Holland. By Jame.S E. Thorold Rogers. New 

 York, Putnam. \i°. 



This book, the last in the Story of the Nations Series, is in some 

 respects an admirable work. The author's conception of history, 

 and his view of what is important in human affairs, are excellent. 

 In particular, he gives but small space to those military operations 

 which are the main element in most popular histories, and confines 

 himself to the far more essential movements of political, intellectual, 

 and commercial life. He conceives very clearly and correctly the 

 part played by Holland in the history of modern Europe, though 

 we think he overrates its importance. He declares that "the re- 

 sistance made by Holland to the Spanish king was infinitely more 

 heroic, far more desperate, much more successful, and infinitely 

 more significant," than that made by the Greeks against the Per- 

 sians ; and 'this is surely a gross exaggeration. The Greeks were 

 the founders of civilization, and its very existence depended en the 

 success of their struggle, and this cannot be said of the Dutch war 

 or any other in history. Nevertheless the great importance of the 

 Dutch contest is undeniable, not merely as affecting Holland itself, 

 but even more in its influence on the politics of Europe. For two 

 centuries the little republic was one of the chief centres of Euro- 

 pean life ; and Mr. Rogers shows clearly how intimately her pros- 

 perity was connected with that of the great nations around her. 

 The war of independence necessarily occupies the chief place in the 

 story ; but the decline of her freedom, and her influence, are also 

 narrated, and the causes of the same are made plain. 



With the general conception of Mr. Rogers's work, then, there is 

 little fault to find ; but we cannot say the same of the execution. 

 The author seems to assume that his readers are already familiar 

 with the history of England and the general history of Europe ; for 

 he perpetually alludes to events outside of Holland which no one 

 not thus informed can possibly understand. The worst example 

 of this is in the thirty-third chapter, which treats of the war of the 

 Spanish succession. The author does not announce his subject at 

 all, but begins by making indirect allusions to it ; and nowhere in 

 the chapter is there any clear statement of what the war was about. 

 In the same chapter Marlborough is frequently alluded to, and 

 always by that name, and then all at once he is spoken of as John 

 Churchill. But there is also a still worse defect in the book : it is 

 full of grammatical blunders and other mistakes of language, the 

 most frequent being the disagreement of the verb with its subject 

 Thus, we read that " piracy and buccaneering was practised ; " 

 that " scenes like those of 1672 was threatened;" and that "the 

 spirits of the Dutch was a little raised." So the author says of a 

 certain Englishman that he " learnt all his learning from Dutch 

 sources," and elsewhere alludes to certain bad harvests as " even 



more disastrous in France than they even were in England." Sucb 

 blunders occur at frequent intervals throughout the book, and seri- 

 ously detract from its merit. 



Patriotic Reader ; or. Human Liberty Developed. By HENRY 

 B. Carrington. Philadelphia, Lippincott. 8". 



This book is a collection of extracts from various writers and 

 speakers, expressing the sentiment of patriotism, and intended to 

 cultivate that sentiment in the mind of the reader. The authors are 

 mostly American, and the passages given are on various topics, 

 such as the lives and character of eminent men, the deeds of he- 

 roes, the blessings of liberty, the future of America, and other, 

 themes on which our popular writers and orators are fond of des- 

 canting. One cliapter consists entirely of " Patriotic and National 

 Hymns, Songs, and Odes," while the rest of the book is mainly 

 prose. Many of the passages given are excellent, but we confess 

 that in the book as a whole there is altogether too much hifalutia 

 and self-glorification to suit our taste. This constant boasting of 

 our country and her institutions is both disagreeable and mis- 

 chievous, as tending to develop national conceit. Our political or- 

 ganization and our fundamental laws are indeed excellent, but our 

 civilization as a whole is by no means high ; and it behooves us to- 

 think of our deficiencies and try to remedy them rather than to be 

 perpetually glorying in the liberty our fathers gave us. The com- 

 piler of this book, however, seems unaware that we have any de- 

 ficiencies, and therefore the most important duties of the patriot at 

 the present day cannot be learned from his pages. 



The Economic Interpretation of History. By JameS E. Thorold 

 Rogers. New York, Putnam. 8°. 



Prof. Michael Foster has spoken, in a recent paper, of the 

 possibility that in the future the sciences of morphology and physi- 

 ology may come together again, because of the interdependence of 

 their subject-matters, form, and function, just as the growing spe- 

 cialization of science started them on different lines in the not very 

 remote past. The same thing is true, in a most interesting and 

 suggestive sense, of history and economics. The former is the 

 morphology of society, and the latter its physiology; and, while 

 they have been far apart in the past, they are clearly approaching 

 each other at present. The so-called ' historical ' school of econo- 

 mists, and the so-called ' historical ' method in economic science, 

 are evidence of this ; and Prof. Thorold Rogers, in the Oxford lec- 

 tures which constitute the book before us, has done something to 

 make the community of the historical and economic fields intelli- 

 gible. The writer's elaborate researches into the condition of labor 

 and wages in England for the past six hundred j'ears, have made 

 possible — perhaps suggested — the present volume. 



The keynote of the book is struck in the following passage from 

 the preface : " The distrust in ordinary political economy has been 

 loudly expressed by workingmen. The labor question has been dis- 

 cussed by many economists with a haughty loftiness which is very ir- 

 ritating. The economist, it is true, informs them that all wealth is the 

 product of labor, that wealth is labor stored in desirable objects, that 

 capital is the result of saved labor, and is being extended and multi- 

 plied by the energies of labor. Then he turns round and rates these 

 workmen for their im providence, their recklessness, their incontinence 

 in foolishly increasing their nu'nbers, and hints that we should all be 

 better off if they left us in their thousands, while there are m.^ny thou- 

 sands of well-off people whose absence from us would be a vast gain. 

 I have never read, in any of the numerous historical works which po- 

 litical economists have written, any attempt to trace the historical 

 causes of this painful spectacle, or to discover whether or no per- 

 sistent wrong-doing has not been the cause of English pauperism. 

 . . . My treatment of my subject, then, is as follows. You have a 

 number of social or economical facts, many of them containing 

 problems of a serious and urgent character. So serious are they, 

 that many persons — an increasingly large number of persons — 

 demand, if no other solution is to be given, that society must be 

 constructed on new lines, as Frankenstein made his man, or mon- 

 ster. To meet these people with the law of supply and demand, 

 to point out to them the bliss of unrestricted competition, and to 

 rebuke them with the .Malthusian law of population, the Ricardian 

 theory of rent, and the margin of unproductive cultivation, is to 



