A New Story of the: World's Wonders Tue Cumine or Science. A Plain Story Simply Told. Edited by Professor J. Arthur Thomson. Volume I. London: George Newnes (Limited), Southampton-street, Strand, W.C. 2.
It is a standing complaint. in our country that the general publio are unappreciative of science. That, of course, is largely caused by the general public's ignorance. It is a common attribute of animals to distrust what they cannot understand. But this ignorance is surely due to the fact that those who understand science take so little trouble to make it intelligible to the public. Far more is being done in the United States. To take in their "National Geographic Ma-gazing," which only costs four dollars a year, is in itself a liberal education, the Morning Post'' observes.
An attempt—and we venture to think a very successful attempt—to do similar work over here is shown in the book now under review. It is edited by perhaps our greatest populariser of science, Professor J. Arthur Thomson, and the first volume covers so wide an area that it requires some imagination to forecast the contents of the other volumes. The book begins with an account of the romance of the heavens, describing in clear yet precise language the marvels of our cosmos. There is also a chapter on the electron and the new view of matter in which even the obscurities of Einstein are made comparatively clear to the lay mind.
But the great bulk of the volume consists of a most fascinating series of chapters on animal life, and here we recognize the hand or
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.