426 



SCIEJSrCE. 



[Vol. IX., No. 221 



possible. The effort of the author, and it has been 

 a successful one, was to enable the intelligent 

 reader, unfamiliar with the nomenclature of the 

 science, to understand the more important phases 

 of its development, and to give him such a knovp^l- 

 edge of its fundamental principles as vrill enable 

 him to comprehend the meaning of vs^hat he sees 

 in electrical devices with which he almost daily 

 comes in contact. The book opens with an ac- 

 count of some experiments in submarine signal- 

 ling, as they might well be called, made in April, 

 1749, by Benjamin Franklin, which pictures him as 

 sporting with his pet sparks ■at a picnic-party on 

 the banks of the Skiiylkil ; and frequently through 

 the pages one discovers little sketches of the per- 

 sonalities of the investigators, which add much to 

 the interest of the reader. We can recommend the 

 book most highly to all those for whom it is in- 

 tended, and commend the publishers forthe way in 

 which it has been brought out, and for the excel- 

 lence of the illustrations, which present so few 

 of the hackneyed cuts disfiguring the ordinary 

 manual. 



The third part of 'A new English dictionary 

 on historical principles ' (Oxford, Clarendon press ; 

 New York, Macmiilan, 1887) has been received. 

 We reviewed at length the first two parts in 

 Science of June 18, 1886. Part iii. deals with 

 8,765 words, from 'batter' to ' boz.' It is a 

 characteristic of the letter B that it contains a 

 comparatively small number of words derived from 

 Latin or Greek, and a preponderating proportion 

 of words of Teutonic origin : hence this section in- 

 cludes many of the oldest words of the language. 

 The B-words are full of problems which have 

 bafiled the efforts of all investigators. Every one 

 of these has received a fresh and independent in- 

 vestigation, in which assistance has been rendered 

 by some of the first living philologists ; and the 

 result has been the discovery of new facts, or the 

 elimination of old errors, in regard to many 

 words. In addition to the words of Old English 

 and Old French origin, this part contains an ex- 

 traordinary number of words of unknown or un- 

 certain derivation. Many of these have no kin in 

 other languages, but stand quite alone in English, 

 and, it cannot be doubted, are more or less recent 

 creations of English itself. B contains many 

 illustrations of the fact that has of late years 

 powerfully impressed itself upon philological 

 students, that the creative period of language, 

 the epoch of roots, has never come to an end. 

 The origin of language is not to be sought merely 

 in a far-off Indo-European antiquity, or in a still 

 earlier pre-Aryan yore-time : it is still in peren- 

 nial process around us. A literary language, with 



its more accessible store of words already in use 

 and sufficient for all ordinary requirements, its 

 more permanent memories and traditions, its con- 

 stant appeals to an authoritative precedent, is 

 hostile to word creation. Such is not the case 

 with language in its natural state, where words 

 are estimated simply as they serve their purpose 

 of communicating the thought or feeling of the 

 moment. The unwritten dialects, and to some 

 extent even slang and colloquial speech, approach 

 in character to language in its natural state, aim- 

 ing only to be expressive, and treating memory 

 and precedent as ministers, not as masters. 

 Some words so coined pass at length from col- 

 loquial into literary use, and are registered in the 

 dictionary as new words, the origin of which is 

 searched for as vainly in the word-hoard of Old 

 English speech, or even the fullest vocabulary of 

 Indo-European roots, as in a school manual of 

 Latin and Greek roots and affixes. 



— Bulletin No. 31 of the U. S. geological sur- 

 vey, by S. H. Scudder, is a systematic review of 

 our present knowledge of fossil insects, including 

 myriapods and spiders. It is essentially a trans- 

 lation, for the benefit of English readers, of the 

 text furnished by the author to Dr. Zittel for his 

 ' Handbuch der Paleontologie.' The German text, 

 however, is accompanied by more than two hun- 

 dred illustrations. M. Barrels is also publishing 

 a French version. Each section of the work is 

 accompanied by a complete bibliography, which 

 shows us at a glance how recently this depart- 

 ment of paleontology has been developed, very 

 few of the titles dating back of 1850, and how 

 extensive and varied the author's own contribu- 

 tions have been. The concise descriptions of the 

 classes, orders, and families, are accompanied by 

 brief notes on the fossil genera and species, with 

 the locality and geological horizon in many cases ; 

 while the stratigraphic distribution and range of 

 each order are shown by tables giving the number 

 of species found in the rocks of each age. No 

 fewer than twenty-six hundred species of true 

 insects have been found fossil up to the present 

 time. The great majority of these, as well as of 

 myriapods and arachnids, are from the middle 

 tertiary. This great irregularity in the chrono- 

 logical distribution of the fossil forms, which is, 

 of course, due largely to the character of the de- 

 posits, is a plain indication that important insect 

 faunas still remain to be discovered. Thus, of 

 the fossil spiders, thirty-one forms are known 

 from the paleozoic strata, one from the mesozoic, 

 and two hundred and eighty-five from the ter- 

 tiary, the great majority of the tertiary forms 

 having been found in the amber deposits of 

 Prussia. 



