the discussion of the morphological relations and stratigraphical significance of the fossils. Brief nominal histories have been appended to the descriptions of many of the most important species, together with some of the most salient points brought out in the present investigation concerning the structural features of the various types. In illustration, the leading Missouri species of each genus have been figured, and also some of those forms heretofore described from the State, but never illustrated. Besides the consideration of the fossils, the stratigraphy of the State is described in an introductory chapter, and a geological map is furnished. In the present volumes animal remains are represented. The fossil plants are to be described hereafter. The work is thoroughly well done.
A History of the United States. By Allen C. Thomas, A. M., Professor of History in Haverford College, Pennsylvania. Boston: D. C. Heath & Co. Pp. 410 + 72. Price, $1.25.
This is a convenient and useful handbook of American history. The volume is profusely illustrated, including some excellent portraits of our distinguished men. Prof. Thomas has condensed within very narrow limits nearly all the essentials of our nation's story. His aim has been to muster the main facts, and impartially deal with events, the causes of which are briefly but clearly brought before the reader's mind. Though the details of great battles are omitted, the causes that led from time to time to hostilities are disclosed, and the best authorities are often cited.
A recent publication of the United States Department of Agriculture is a Monographic Revision of the Pocket Gophers, exclusive of the species of Thomomys, by Dr. C. Hart Merriam. It is a pamphlet of 258 octavo pages, illustrated with nineteen plates, four maps, and seventy-one figures in the text. Excepting part of the first chapter, less than twenty pages, it is composed of the most technical sort of biological material, absolutely unintelligible to ninety-nine per cent of the farmers for whose information it is ostensibly published. The author, who is Chief of the Division of Ornithology and Mammalogy in the department, explains its appearance in these words: "In preparing a bulletin on the economic relations of the pocket gophers it became necessary to determine the status and geographic distribution of the various forms. This study developed the fact that the group was sorely in need of technical revision. The present paper is the outgrowth of an attempt at such a revision. It has grown so far beyond the limits originally intended that a large genus (Thomomys) has been of necessity omitted and will form the subject of a subsequent paper." So it seems that another volume like this is threatened, and meanwhile the farmers must wait for what may be of some use to them—the economic account, which, the author tells us, "will appear as a separate bulletin prepared by my assistant." The biological information in the bulletin before us has its value for science, but it is an imposition to pay for its collection and publication with money that the people have devoted to the advancement of agriculture.
The first issue in the political series of the Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin is an examination of The Geographical Distribution of the Vote of the Thirteen States on the Federal Constitution, by Orin G. Libby. While State lines are used for convenience in pointing out the distribution of Federal and anti-Federal sentiment, attention is directed especially to those social and economic areas which have been the true units in political history. The monograph is accompanied by General Walker's map showing the distribution of the population of the United States in 1790, and a map showing the distribution of the vote on the Federal Constitution.
Parts II and III of Vol. XXVI, Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History, contain papers on Faceted Pebbles on Cape Cod, by Prof. W. M. Davis; Small Mammals from the New Hampshire Mountains, by Gerrit S. Miller, Jr.; Some Typical Eskers of Southern New England, by J. B. Woodworth; Spharagemon, a Study of the New England Species, by Albert P. Morse; Theories of Evolution, by Prof. Edward B. Poulton, of Oxford; and briefer communications from Profs. Harrison Allen, N. S. Shaler, F. W. Putnam, W. G. Farlow, and others. In the year 1893-'94 the society received by
