Notices respecting New Books. 631 



science of Nature. Instead of the traditional space, time, and 

 materia], we have now to deal with " durations" which we are 

 asked to conceive as temporal thicknesses or slabs of nature, and 

 we are taken through the whole range of transformations which 

 the new concept requires. In Part IV. we have the theory of 

 objects. It is a most important section. For though we may 

 hold with the idealist philosophers that there are no things, we 

 cannot have physical science and no objects. How, then, do events 

 take on the character of objects ? The theory gives the answer. 

 In his final chapter, entitled " Rhythms," Professor Whitehead 

 shows how deeply he is in sympathy with the philosophers who, 

 like Bergson, approach the great problem of the ultimate nature 

 of physical reality from the side of spirit rather than from the side 

 of matter. 



It will be seen then that this book is simply invaluable to anyone 

 who wishes to bring himself into line with the new principle of 

 relativity, whether his interest be scientific in the narrow sense or 

 philosophical in the wide sense. 



John Stuart Mill tells us in his Autobiography that he was at 

 times actually depressed by the thought that musical chords though 

 practically infinite in the number of combinations they admitted 

 were yet in reality finite and exhaustible. Our feeling as we close 

 Professor Whitehead's book is one almost of elation at the thought 

 of how little we know, and how uncertain is the little we think 

 we know, when we form our concepts of the framework of infinite 

 Nature. 



Manual of Meteorology. Part IV. : The Relation of tlie Wind to the 

 Distribution of Barometric Pressure. By Sir Napier Shaw, Sc.D., 

 E.R.S. [Pp. xvi + 166, with 3 plates.] Cambridge: At the 

 University Press, 1919. Price \2s. Qd. net. 



The other Parts of the manual of which the volume under review 

 forms Part IV. have not yet been published. The appearance of 

 the last Part in advance, though it may at first appear strange, is due 

 to excellent reasons. Whilst the subject-matter which will form 

 the first three Parts of the manual is available to the student of 

 meteorology in various sources of reference, the present volume 

 represents mainly the progress made by those who have been 

 associated with the work of the Meteorological Office during the past 

 twenty years. The subject-matter was not, therefore, previously 

 available in collected form. The author has, in fact, incorporated 

 the results of several quite recent researches. Students of 

 meteorology are indebted to him, not only for having collected 

 together the subject-matter, the greater part of which has hitherto 

 only been available in the scattered original publications, but also 

 for having combined it into a homogeneous whole and, in doing 

 so, setting out what is practically a general meteorological theory. 

 As a working hypothesis, with which to test the complicated 



