546 Analyses of Books . September, 
light oils, carbolic, creosote, and anthracene oils, running off the 
pitch, and testing the tar. 
The following chapters treat in succession of pitch, of anthra- 
cene oil, the sublimation of anthracene, and an account of its 
properties and analysis ; of creosote oil, carbolic acid and 
naphthalene, light oil and first runnings, the rectification by 
steam and the final produces, and ammoniacal liquor. Into these 
sections, which are written with thoroughness and care, want of 
space does not allow us to enter. 
A very valuable feature of this work are the figures of plant 
and apparatus, which are very clear and carefully drawn, in most 
instances to scale. 
The work must be pronounced a boon to chemical industry, 
similar in nature to the author’s classical treatise on the manu- 
facture of sulphuric acid and alkali. 
The index is fairly copious and correCt wherever we have 
tested it, and the getting up of the book is quite satisfactory. 
Vignettes from Nature. By Grant Allen. London : Chatto 
and Windus. 
Mr. Allen is deservedly well known as one of the happiest ex- 
pounders of the great theory of Evolution. Few have done so 
much as he in winning for it the favourable attention of educated 
outsiders, especially among the artistic and literary world, and 
in lulling to sleep the watchful dragons of British Philistinism. 
At the same time, by his work, “ The Colour Sense, its Origin 
and Development,”* he has rendered good service towards solving 
some of the most interesting problems which we encounter in the 
animal and vegetable kingdoms. The work before us, as the 
author tells us, “ forms the record of a single summer’s stray 
thoughts on Nature, from an easy-going, half-scientific, half- 
sesthetic standpoint.” Here, as in all his writings, Mr. Allen 
shows himself as an orthodox Darwinian, not in the popular, but 
in the striCler sense of the term, to-wit, a believer in Evolution 
as effeCled by the processes of Natural and Sexual Selection. 
He claims for his essays nothing more than to be “ popular ex- 
positions of current evolutionary thought,” and hopes that “ they 
may perhaps do a little good in spreading more widely a know- 
ledge of those great biological and cosmical doCtrines, which are 
now revolutionising the European mind,” but which are being 
less rapidly assimilated by the national mind here in the native 
* Journal of Science, 1879, p. 393. 
