318 Literary Notices. 



well selected, and they are for the most part well written. The 

 weak part is the natural history and microscopy. Physics, che- 

 mistry, astronomy, music, and a host of other subjects, are judiciously 

 treated, and the general promise of the prospectus fairly carried 

 out. 



Light; its Influence on Life and Health, by Fobles Win- 

 slow, M.D., D.C.L. Oxon, (Hon.), etc., etc. (Longmans). — Ds. 

 Winslow's work is popular rather than scientific. It is pleasantly 

 written, and well adapted for family reading. The chapters on the 

 supposed influence of the moon on disease, and especially on insanity, 

 contain much important evidence in favour of ascribing such action 

 to our satellite, but such a subject requires much more elaborate 

 and scientific treatment than Dr. Winslow has given to it. With 

 the very common tendency of diseases to periodicity, it would be 

 expected that in a great number of instances their times of dimi- 

 nution or increase would coincide accidentally with the periods of 

 any regularly recurring series of events. For example, the tides 

 ebb and flow at fixed intervals, and it is a very common popular 

 belief that the ebbing of the tides influences the termination of 

 human life, and creates a period of maximum death. Now in a 

 populous country nothing could be easier than to obtain an immense 

 number of instances in which death paid its visits as the waters 

 flowed away ; but a more complete analysis would dispose of the 

 theory by exhibiting numerous instances of its failure. In like 

 manner, a doctor having a lunar theory will readily find apparent 

 confirmation, but another doctor not possessed with such a theory 

 would discover abundance of facts that did not coincide with it. The 

 influence of the moon on the weather has been a prevailing belief 

 in all centuries and ages, and yet how very few propositions affirming 

 such action can be considered as at all substantiated.- The moon may 

 influence weather and may influence disease in more ways than one, 

 but its influence may be so mixed up with other influences as to be 

 difficult to disentangle, and by no means sure to dominate. It is 

 rather surprising to find a physician of Dr. Forbes Winslow's 

 standing citing with approbation the nonsensical remark of Mr. 

 Steinmetz that sunshine consists of a metallic shower because the 

 solar photosphere appears to contain incandescent metallic vapours. 

 The ascription of physiological effects to the "iron vapour" of a 

 sunbeam is more comical than scientific. In the first place there is 

 not a particle of evidence that the sun sends us through his beams 

 a supply of iron from his own body, and in the next place if a sun- 

 beam were imagined to contain iron at all, the quantity would put 

 to shame the infinitesimal doses of the homocopathists, at which 

 Dr. Winslow would, no doubt, laugh. Sunbeams are practically 

 imponderable in the finest balances, though if we conceive them as 

 a motion of particles, the particles may have weight, though to an 

 inappreciable extent. A great mass of concentrated sunbeams 

 weigh nothing, or nothing appreciable, and yet they may contain 

 iron enough for a medical dose ! ' We. hope Dr. Winslow will never 

 overdose a patient after such a theory of infinitesimal action. 



The Nobtu-West Peninsula of Iceland; being the Journal of a 



