620 
Analyses of Books. 
[O&ober, 
The words which we have italicised seem to us to convey an 
admission that in Electricity and Magnetism, and by a parity of 
reasoning in other branches of Science, a knowledge of the 
subject-matter is insufficient without an acquaintance with the 
idiosyncracies of the examiners. In other words, it accentuates 
the fact that to “ know ” and to “ pass ” are not connected to- 
gether by any essential necessity. ... , 
In a laudatory notice of the first edition of this little work, y 
a medical contemporary, we find also the following significant 
remark: — “Many students fail from a want of knowledge how 
to put their answers concisely into words.” This is another im- 
peachment of the modern English educational system, all the 
more telling because stridtly unintentional. It is tantamount to 
a confession that an acquaintance with any subjecft is insufficient 
if the student lacks the power of talking about it in a certain 
approved style. ... . . 
If we waive, however, these principial objections we find tfiat 
Mr. Levander has executed his task exceedingly ably. His book 
will be unquestionably useful and welcome to those— and they 
are not few — whose tastes or whose necessities make the passing 
an examination seem to them a desirable objedL. The treatise 
is in fadt a “ coach,” consisting of paper and ink instead of flesh 
and blood. 
The Harz Mountains : their Geological Structure and History. 
By H. M. Cadell, B.Sc., of the Geological Survey of 
Scotland. 
This memoir is a reprint from the Proceedings of the Royal 
Physical Society of Edinburgh. The author points out in the 
outset that the Harz is, like the Alps, Pyrenees, and Himalayas, 
a mountain system of elevation, and not, like the Norwegian 
mountain mass or the Scottish Highlands, a table-land of denu- 
dation. Its culminating point, the Brocken, of uncanny memory, 
is 3746 feet in height, but is supposed to have been at one time 
much more elevated. The area now occupied by these mountains 
is described as having been during the Palaeozoic period a por- 
tion of the sea, in which the Silurian, Devonian, and Lower 
Carboniferous formations of Central Europe were deposited. 
The rocks with their fossils show changes in the depth and con- 
dition of this sea, but they form throughout a perfedly conform- 
able system. In the Devonian period there was vigorous 
volcanic action, with protrusion of diabases and tuffs. About 
the close of the Lower Carboniferous the sea became shallower, 
the rocks which had been formed below the sea were upheaved 
