New York Agricultural Experiment Station. Third Annual Report of the Board of Control, for 1884. Albany: Weed, Parsons & Co. Pp. 421, with Plates.
The station is reported as now better equipped for its work than at any previous period. Not only have the apparatus for scientific and practical work been provided, but information has been and is being acquired reading the condition of our soil and climate. The work at such a station is necessarily cumulative in its character, and each year must mark improvement in conditions whereby previous work may become more available. Considerable space in the report is devoted to the examination of "duplicates," under the conviction that where true duplicates can not be obtained, "it is unwise to expend our energy in attempting work over which we can have no check. . . . Indeed, until agricultural science, so called, can be subjected to the tests that are recognized as essential to correctness in other sciences, we can not hope for that progress which we desire." The most important feature of the present report is the description and classification of the varieties of corn which are graphically illustrated in the plates. The attempt at classification has been extended to the varieties of vegetables, of which some twelve hundred have been grown, "but the work is a difficult one, and requires much careful study." Other subjects embraced in the report arc the trial of germinations, the rooting habits of plants, nitrogen-supply, feeding-experiments, and experiments with milk.
Italian Popular Tales. By Thomas Frederick Crane, Professor of the Romance Languages in Cornell University. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, & Co. Pp. 389. Price, $2.50.
The growing interest in the popular talcs of Europe, and in the new branch of anthropological research, folklore, is the justification for the appearance of this handsome volume. By popular tales, the translator means the stories that are handed down by word of mouth from one generation to another of illiterate people, serving almost exclusively to amuse but seldom to instruct. They may be roughly divided into three classes: nursery tales, fairy stories, and jests. They were regarded with contempt by the learned till the brothers Grimm some sixty years ago collected those of Germany and introduced them to the public. Now they are industriously sought for and collected from all parts of the world. The stories in the present volume arc, for the most part, presented for the first time to the English reader, and have been translated from recent Italian collections, which give them exactly as they were taken down from the mouths of the people. The stories are annotated for comment and illustration, and the subject is further elucidated by a history, in the introduction, of the principal Italian collections, and a bibliography.
Two Years in the Jungle. By William T. Hornaday. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Pp. 512, with Map and Plates. Price, $4.
Mr. Hornaday is chief taxidermist in the United States National Museum, and was for several years collector for the natural science establishment of Professor Henry A. Ward, of Rochester, New York. The observations and adventures related in this book are such as happened to him while on a collecting tour for that gentleman, in the course of which he spent two years in India, Ceylon, the Malay Peninsula, and Borneo. That which he describes in it is offered as a faithful pen-picture "of what may be seen and done by almost any healthy young man in two years of ups and downs in the East Indies." The author says that he has labored in preparing his pages "to avoid all forms of exaggeration, and to represent everything with photographic accuracy as to facts and figures. It is easy to overestimate and color too highly, and I have fought hard to keep out of my story every elephant and monkey who had no right to a place in it. I consider it the highest duty of a traveler to avoid carelessness in the statement of facts. A narrative of a journey is not a novel, in which the writer may put down as seen anything that might have been seen."
Journal or the American Akadêmê. Alexander Wilder, Editor. Newark, New Jersey. Pp. 24.
The American Akadêmê is an association having for its purpose to promote the
