378 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
tables and rules. Every engineer will find in this work many practical points 
beyond the mere mechanical handling of a locomotive, which cannot fail to be of 
great value to him, not only while on the footboard but after he has graduated 
from that into higher Dositions. 
Poems of Passion: By Ella Wheeler. i2mo., pp. i6o. Belford, Clarke & 
Co., Chicago, 1883. For sale by M. H. Dickinson, $1.00. 
This very elegantly and tastefully prepared book contains the outpourings of 
the author's soul in the form of some four-score short poems on various subjects ; 
nearly all, however, properly enough coming within the scope of the title of the 
work, "Poems of Passion," though as many as fifty of them are classed as 
" Miscellaneous." Passionate they certainly are, all of them, and poems some 
of them are, but not all. The prologue or preface presents a fair sample of both 
the poetry and the versification which pervades the whole, and accordingly we 
copy it : 
'* Oh, you who read some song that I have sung — 
What know you of the soul from whence it sprung ? 
Dost dream the poet ever speaks aloud 
His secret thought into the listening crowd ? 
Go take the murmuring sea-shell from the shore — 
You have its shape, its color — and no more. 
It tells not one of those vast mysteries 
That be beneath the surface of the seas. 
Our songs are shells, cast out by waves of thought ; 
Here, take them at your pleasure ; but think not 
You've seen beneath the surface of the waves, 
Where lie our shipwrecks, and our coral caves." 
The "passion" appears prominently in such poems as " Love's Language," 
"Communism," "Guilo," "Conversion," "Delilah," "The Duet," etc., through 
all of which the poetical vein runs with more or less harmony and rhythm. As 
intimated above, we find some halting feet, some defective rhymes and some 
rather arid thought, but as an whole we decide these verses to be fully up to the 
average. 
The work of the publishers is, with the exception of a few errors of proof- 
reading — for instance " chasee " for chasse, " vallfy " for valley, "tonight" 
for to-night, " today " for to-day, etc. — extremely well done. 
Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science, Volume VIIT, 1881-2. 
Octavo, pp. 85. Kansas Publishing House, Topeka, 1883. 
In this volume are combined the Transactions of the fourteenth and fifteenth 
annual meetings of this Association, together with the Report of the Secretary. 
