Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/138

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128
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

volume should be mentioned an address on the Sabbath, in which a strict and dismal mode of observing the day is deprecated; and an address delivered at the Birkbeck Institution, which tells much of Tyndall's own student-life. Persons who have read the Fragments of Science by Tyndall will find the present volume no less interesting.

A Treatise on the Ligation of the Great Arteries in Continuity, with Observations on the Nature, Progress, and Treatment of Aneurism. By Charles A. Ballance, F. R. C. S., and Walter Edmunds, F. R. C. S. London and New York: Macmillian & Co. Pp. 568. Price, $10.

This elegant volume embodies the results of extended researches and of many experiments upon the lower animals undertaken with the view of lessening the liability to hæmorrhage after the ligation of an artery. After two brief introductory chapters the nature of arteries and the processes of physiological occlusion and pathological obliteration are described. Then the conduct and fate of the corpuscles, the clot, the coats, and the ligature are successively discussed. The phenomena of suppuration and hæmorrhage are next examined, and a chapter on the conduct and fate of the aneurism follows. Taking up the surgery of the arteries in detail, the authors give the views and practice of the earlier and later surgeons, and discuss the choice of the operation, the ligature, the knot, and the force. A concluding chapter treats of the conduct of the operation and the fate of the patient. The work is printed in large type, with wide margins, and is illustrated with ten plates, including a frontispiece portrait of Scarpa, and 232 figures.

The Genesis of Genesis. A Study of the Documentary Sources of the First Book of Moses, in Accordance with the Results of Critical Science, illustrating the Presence of Bibles within the Bible. By Benjamin Wisner Bacon. Hartford: The Student Publishing Company. Pp. 352. Price, $2.50.

In preparing this book, the author has assumed that the reading public are entitled to judge for themselves concerning the value of what is called the higher criticism. For this end they require, not controversial argument, but explanation; and he does not consider it necessary that the presentation of the case should be made from the point of view of hostility to the new theory, or even from one of indifference. An introduction by Prof. George F. Moore, of Andover Theological Seminary, gives the history of the higher criticism, or of questions of the authorship of Genesis from the time it was started by Aben Ezra, in the twelfth century. The introductory part of the work proper contains chapters on Higher Criticism and the Science of Documentary Analysis, The Science of Biblical Criticism, and The Documentary Theory of To-day. In Part II is shown the text of Genesis according to the Revised Version, in varieties of type to exhibit the constituent sources and method of their compilation according to the general consensus of critical analysis, with notes explanatory of the phenomena of reduction. Part III presents the separate documents designated as J, E, and P, conjecturally restored, with revised translation according to emended text and conjectural readings of good authority. In the appendix are given "the great flood interpolation and connected passages, placed in juxtaposition with a translation of their cuneiform parallels."

A Text-Book of Bacteriology. By Carl Fraenkel, M. D., Professor of Hygiene, University of Kbnigsberg. Translated and edited from the third German edition by J. H. Linsley, M. D., Professor of Pathology and Bacteriology in the University of Vermont. New York: William Wood & Co. Pp. 380. Price, $3.75.

Systematic study of the bacteria is included at present not only in the curriculum of medical schools, but also forms part of a biological course in many of our universities. Its interpretation of the causes of disease has led to a sense of its value, and the methods of German and French investigators are followed with increasing eagerness by students. A considerable number of volumes consisting of translations and original lectures upon the subject is already accessible in English, but no one of these is perhaps an adequate text-book. Dr. Linsley has therefore translated and adapted to use Fraenkel's Grundriss der Bakterienkunde, a manual whose worth is attested by its rendering into six different languages.

In this work little space is allowed for