NATURE STUDY IN SCHOOLS. 83 



BOOK NOTICES. 



The Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution. 



The annual report of the Smithsonian Institution for 1896 has just come 

 to hand. This is a volume of over eleven hundred pages and contains sev- 

 eral papers of great interest. 



The first 348 pages are taken up by a very valuable paper upon 

 Prehistoric Art as manifested by Prehistoric Man, by Thomas Wilson. 



Art is defined in the beginning as an expression of the human emo- 

 tions, either by sound in music, poetry, and the drama, or in painting, 

 sculpture, engraving, architecture, and the dance. 



There are three kinds of art ; fine, decorative, and industrial. 

 The earliest manifestations of human art consisted of flint clippings, 

 and belong to the Paleolithic Period of the Stone Age. The people who 

 made these lived way back in the Quartenary Geological Period, and hence 

 earlier than the present geeological period. 



" The man of this time has passed for a savage, and he doubtless was 

 one. He had no tribal organizations, no sociology, no be ef in a future 

 state, no religion ; he did not bury his dead, he erected no monuments, 

 he built no houses ; he was a hunter and fisher, he had no local habi- 

 tation, dwelt in no villages. * * * * Yet he occupied in the Solutreen 

 Epoch the highest rank as a flint clipper, and in the Madelainien Epoch the 

 highest place as an engraver on bone and ivory. His materials were the 

 bones, horns, and tusks of the animals he killed. His tools, or implements, 

 were sharply worked points or gravers of flint." 



The first flint clippings are found in what is sometimes known as the 

 Cave Bear Period and occur beneath the gravelly deposit of the River Marne. 

 All this illustrates the great antiquity of man, and is so highly instructive 

 that we wish we could quote further from Mr. Wilson's work, but lack of 

 space will not permit us to give further notice of this highly interesting and 

 valuable paper. Other papers of value in this volume are Chess and Play- 

 ing Cards, by Stewart Culin, Biblical Antiquities by Cyrus Adler and I. M. 

 Casanowicz, and the Lamp of the Eskimo by Walter Hough. 



The April number of Bird Lore contains some gems of photographs, 

 among which are that of the Least Bittern, which is one of the best photo- 

 graphs of bird life that we have ever seen, and that of a Bird in the Hand. 

 Bird Lore is truly an ideal ornithological magazine. 



