142 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 



BOOK NOTICES, 



A Grammar of the Cakchiquel Language of Guatemala: By D. G.. 

 Brinton, Philadelphia, 1884; pp. 72, 8vo. 



The Maya dialects constitute a group of Central American languages which 

 have been investigated by the Spanish missionaries with untiring industry and 

 corresponding success from an early epoch. Their poverty in grammatic forms 

 renders their acquisition rather easy, although the phonetic part presents some 

 difficulty to strangers. The Maya dialects spoken in Guatemala are divided by 

 Dr. O. Stoll, a recent investigator among the Indians of that country, into three 

 sections, called by him the Pokonchi, the Qu'iche and the Mame group; at an 

 early period the Qu'iche language separated into two main dialects, the Qu'iche 

 proper and the Cakchiquel, and subsequently the latter of these formed a sub- 

 dialect called the Tz'utujil. 



There is in the library of the American Philosophical Society, in Philadel- 

 phia, a volume containing several tracts in Cakchiquel and Spanish, one of which, 

 composed by an anonymous author in 1692 (54 pages), embodies a grammar of 

 it and has just been published in an English translation by Dr. Daniel G. Brin- 

 ton. To increase the value of this publication, the learned editor has combined 

 with this material all the further information which he could obtain upon this 

 guttural tongue from two manuscript grammars in his own library : that of Benito 

 de Villacanas, a Dominican missionary in the tribe, who died 1610, and that of 

 another ecclesiastic, Estevan Torresano, who wrote shortly after 1753. Without 

 altering the unscientific plan which the authors have followed in their work, Dr. 

 Brinton has at least improved it by adding numerous critical notes to the rules and 

 paradigms of the padres, and prefaced the whole by a useful bibliographic intro- 

 duction. An autographic map of Western and Central Guatemala is a very wel- 

 come addition to the volume. 



A. S. G. 



The True Theory of the Sun, Showing the Common Origin of the Solar Spots 

 and Corona, and of Atmospheric Storms and Cyclones : By Thomas Bass- 

 net. G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1884. $2.00. 



The salient points of the "true theory" as set forth in Mr. Bassnet's book 

 are the following : 



1. All space is flooded with an ethereal fluid possessing the common prop- 

 erties of matter but imponderable. 



2. At the sun a vortex has been formed in this fluid which keeps up a per- 

 petual current through the system. 



