Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/292

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278
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

ley during the Glacial period, by Warren Upham, who prosecuted the work, under the direction of Prof. T. C. Chamberlin, during four years in Minnesota and North Dakota, and by special arrangement with the authorities concerned, in Manitoba. The Canadian part of the lake has also been examined by Dr. G. M. Dawson.

The twenty-sixth volume is an account of the Amboy Clays, New Jersey, by Dr. J. S. Newberry, completed and revised, after the author became unable to put the finishing touches upon it, by Arthur Hollick, who has also prefixed to the work a brief review of Dr. Newberry's contributions to fossil botany. The Amboy clays are a part of the Cretaceous formation, extending across the State of New Jersey from the Delaware to the southern part of Staten Island, and are the seat of large potteries. Dr. Newberry describes one hundred and fifty-six species of plants found in these clays, mostly from the middle bed in the series, with remains of, perhaps, thirty other species, not clearly identified.

Volume twenty-seven is the Geology of the Denver Basin, Colorado, by S. F. Emmons, Whitman Cross, and G. H. Eldridge. The publication of this report has been considerably delayed, as is explained in the preface, by discoveries made while the survey was going on that made further researches desirabla The importance of these discoveries is indicated when it is said that they bear upon the determination of the age of the Eocky Mountain uplift and the line between Cretaceous and Tertiary formations in general, and upon the recognition of coal-bearing horizons throughout the Rocky Mountain region. The area specially treated in the report is regarded as a type of the "foothill belt" of the Great Plains.

The twenty-eighth volume is the final report of the Marquette Iron-bearing District of Michigan, by C. R. Van Hise and W. S. Bayley, with an atlas, including also a chapter on the Republic Trough, by H. L. Smith.

The Transactions of the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the American Climatological Association, Washington, 1897, includes, besides the address of President E. F. Ingalls, on The Antiseptic Treatment and the Limitation of Climatic Treatment of Pulmonary Tuberculosis, twenty-one papers by physicians on subjects related to health, climate, disease, and cure. One hundred and twenty-one members attended the meeting. The meeting for 1898 is to be held in Bethlehem, N. H.

The International American Conference, or Pan-American Congress, as it is more commonly known, in 1890, recommended the adoption by the Governments represented in it, of a common nomenclature designating in alphabetical order in equivalent terms, in English, Portuguese, and Spanish, the commodities on which import duties are levied, to be used in all transactions in which those duties are in question and in business documents. The nomenclature has been prepared, and is now published by the Bureau of American Republics at the Government Printing Office, Washington, as the Code of International Nomenclature of that bureau. It consists of three quarto volumes, giving the terms in three orders—English, Spanish, and Portuguese; Spanish, English, and Portuguese; and Portuguese, Spanish, and English, a volume being devoted to each order. The vocabularies embrace more than twenty thousand commercial terms used in the Latin-American trade, in each of the three languages; and are adapted to the counting room, the factory, the shipping office, customs offices, courts, to the use of economists and statisticians, and of all persons directly interested in the business relations of the states of the Western hemisphere. The book will no doubt be of great use and extremely valuable to publicists, business men, and students, and may easily justify its existence; but why the publication of it should be imposed upon the Government rather than left to private enterprise is a matter which one imbued with American notions of the functions of government, and particularly of those of the Government of the United States, will find it hard to comprehend.

In the ninth special report of the Commissioner of Labor a social and economic study of The Italians in Chicago is presented. A very minute analysis is given, under twenty headings, of the social and economical conditions, literacy and illiteracy, nativity, conjugal state, families, school attendance and other facts, by sex, nativity, age, etc. It includes data for 6,773 persons in all, 4,493 of whom were born in Italy, grouped into 1,348 fami-