LITERAK 
©S3®®® 
NOTICES 
Fishes in the Home. By Ida M. Mellen. 
New York City: New York Zoological 
Society. 
Small fishes may be made available for 
nature study in any home. This handbook, 
beautifully printed and with many attractive 
illustrations, tells the whole story. We cor- 
dially recommend it to our readers who wish 
information regarding home aquaria. In a 
way everybody loves an aquarium but com- 
paratively few know how to manage it, as 
is evinced by the large number of small 
globe monstrosities that find a ready sale in 
many stores. A thing that is worth doing 
at all is worth doing well. If you like to 
have fish in the home get this handbook and 
do the work well. Do not make the aquatic 
pets miserable by a lack of proper care and 
of proper surroundings. 
Nut Growing. By Robert T. Morris. New 
York City: The Macmillan Company. 
Our local readers will be especially inter- 
ested in this book because Dr. Morris is so 
well and favorably known in this vicinity 
not only as a surgeon but as an enthusiast 
in growing nuts at his picturesque farm in 
the northern part of Stamford. He has told 
the story in his interesting, philosophic style 
but with every practical detail. 
Nuts supply all essentials of human food 
and are coming into more general use. Nut 
trees promise to become an important part 
of the new agriculture. So eminent a physi- 
olog st as Dr. Kellogg advocates nuts as a 
staple of human diet. Dr. Morris explains 
the possibility of an extension of this line 
of food supply. Especially valuable is his 
description of methods of nut tree growing 
which avoid the difficulty of grafting and 
are applicable to all sorts of tree grafting. 
The Salvaging of Civilization. By H. G. 
Wells. New York City: The Macmillan 
Company. 
Not only because Mr. Wells has come into 
special prominence with his much discussed 
"Outline of History” but because of its 
merits as a study of what the human race is 
doing, this book is interesting and important 
to the general reader, particularly from the 
human evolutionary aspect. Not all of us 
have the pessimistic fears that trouble Mr. 
Wells and induce him to believe that we are 
going to be shipwrecked as a race, but all 
of us will find it interesting and beneficial 
to look upon both sides of the question. Mr. 
Wells tenaciously supports his side of the 
argument. His heart is in the subject. He 
has produced interesting reading. His ad- 
vocacy of historical literature for the safety 
of the human race is indeed a notable com- 
pliment to the value of letters. He puts 
almost the entire stress of salvaging upon 
what he calls the coupling up of our present 
Bible with other good literary material so 
as to make an enlarged “Bible of Civiliza- 
tion.” 
American Boy’s Book of Wild Animals. 
By Dan Beard. Philadelphia and Lon- 
don: J. B. Lippincott Company. 
What can be more fascinating to the real 
boy than wild animals? He is always eager 
to get out where some of them have their 
haunts. Dan Beard in his latest addition to 
the Woodcraft Series offers the next best 
thing to a trip into the wild itself. His new 
book is filled with incident and adventure — 
stories of bears, wild cats, deer, opossum 
and all the small furry things that dash and 
scamper away at the sound of man’s ap- 
proach. 
The author is National Scout Commis- 
sioner for the Boy Scouts of America and, 
next to Sir Robert Baden-Powell, there is 
probably no man who is in so close touch 
with the work of this organization or who 
has a wider knowledge and greater love of 
the w’Td, its ways and its denizens. He has 
the gift of being able to make real and 
interesting to youthful readers all the things 
which he writes about with so much en- 
thusiasm, and it is through this gift that 
his previous books on woodcraft have gained 
so widely in favor among those who are to 
become the best in national manhood. 
Uncle Dan has spent most of his life in 
the open; his experiences with wild animals 
have been numerous; some of them exciting; 
the mosl interesting of these are told as 
only the author knows how. 
A Book About the Bee. By Herbert Mace. 
New York City: E. P. Dutton and Com- 
pany. 
We hail with delight this interesting book. 
It goes directly to the natural history of the 
hive and is therefore in perfect harmony 
with the spirit of this magazine. The author 
says and we heartily agree with him: 
“Out of a list of thirty-five ‘bee books’ 
which I have looked over, no less than 
twentv-eight are practical handbooks. Five 
are highly scientific works, and the other 
two are almost of a metaphysical nature, in 
that the bees are only used as a peg on 
which to hang a dissertation on human life 
and conduct. 
“Everyone does not want to keep bees; 
few people feel intensely interested in de- 
tailed descriptions of the internal anatomy 
of the insect; while it is not every reader 
who is pleased, on getting half-way through 
