LITERARY NOTICES. 



HS 



" such permission shall not be granted 

 unless the foreign order shall have 

 been conferred in consequence of 

 active and distinguished service before 

 the enemy, either at sea or in the 

 field, 1 ' or unless the party " shall have 

 been in the service of the foreign sov- 

 ereign by whom the foreign order is 

 conferred." It may be thought that 

 this is a very light cross to bear, but 

 we republicans cannot understand how 

 grave these considerations are in Eng- 

 land. Virtue may be its own reward, 

 and wealth, fame, and the honor of 

 making discoveries, may fill the meas- 

 ure of ambition nearly full, but noth- 

 ing fills out, and sweetens, and hap- 

 pifies the life of the typical Britisher, 

 like a decoration. When, therefore, 

 an appreciative foreign sovereign sends 

 over a bundle of ribbons for distribu- 

 tion among the distinguished F. R. S.'s, 

 it certainly appears hard that they can- 

 not be allowed to wear them. The 

 editor of Nature has all our sympathy 

 when he says : " It seems to us unjust 

 and cruel that men of science, to whose 

 labors it is mainly owing that our coun- 

 try and the world generally are mount- 

 ing rapidly higher and higher in the 

 scale of civilization, should be prac- 

 tically debarred from accepting the 

 few honors that come in their way." 



LITERARY NOTICES. 



The Atmosphere. Translated from the 

 French of Camille Flammarion. Edited 

 by James Glaisher, F. R. S. With 10 

 Chromo-Lithographs and 86 Woodcuts. 

 450 pages 8vo. Price, $6.00. Harper & 

 Brothers. 



A volume like this, summing up our 

 knowledge of the atmosphere, has been 

 long wanted, and it is now well supplied. 

 The scientific investigation of the air may 

 be said to have commenced with the dis- 

 covery of its weight and the invention of 

 the barometer about 1643, and the eight 

 generations of investigation that have in- 

 tervened have developed a vast body of facts 

 and laws relating to atmospheric phenom- 



ena, so that, considered alone as a measure 

 of what has been done in this period toward 

 clearing up the mysteries of Nature, M. Flam- 

 marion's book would be very interesting. 

 The French edition was twice the size of 

 the present translation, and was a regular 

 cyclopaedia of atmology, but, by cutting off 

 certain parts of it which dealt with the re- 

 moter relations of the air, as for example 

 its influence upon plants, and by retrench- 

 ing the exuberant imaginative style in which 

 it was written, and in which popular French 

 writers so delight, the translator has brought 

 the work within very reasonable limits, and 

 adapted it more perfectly to the taste of 

 English readers. The edition has, moreover, 

 gained greatly in accuracy and trustworthi- 

 ness by the rigorous censorship of its editor, 

 Mr. Glaisher, whose position as a scientific 

 meteorologist is no doubt superior to that 

 of the author of the work. The book is 

 very free from technicalities, and, in its sim- 

 plicity, accuracy, and attractiveness, it is an 

 excellent example of popular scientific liter- 

 ature. Its general object, as stated by the 

 editor, has been " to produce a work giving 

 a broad outline of the causes which give rise 

 to facts of every-day occurrence in the at- 

 mosphere, in such a form that any reader 

 who wished to obtain a general view of such 

 phenomena and their origin would be 

 readily enabled to do so. The great num- 

 ber of subjects treated of will thus, to the 

 majority of readers, who merely desire an 

 insight into the general principles that pro- 

 duce phenomena, which every one has seen 

 or heard of, be found to be rather an ad- 

 vantage, as the whole range of atmospheric 

 action is thus displayed in the same volume 

 in moderate compass, without so much de- 

 tail being anywhere given as to make the 

 book other than interesting to even the 

 most casual reader. 



11 The work treats of the form, dimen- 

 sions, and movements of the earth, and of 

 the influence exerted on the meteorology by 

 the physical conformation of our globe ; of 

 the figure, height, color, weight, and chemi- 

 cal components of the atmosphere ; of the 

 meteorological phenomena induced by the 

 action of light, and the optical appearances 

 which objects present as seen through dif- 

 ferent atmospheric strata ; of the phenom- 

 ena connected with heat, wind, clouds, rain, 



