Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/293

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SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE.
279

lies. The average size of these families is 5.02 persons each. As for occupation, 60.68 per cent of all the persons were of the unproductive class; less than one per cent were engaged in agriculture, fisheries, and mining, or professional work; 17.78 per cent in domestic and personal service; 10.14 percent in trade and transportation; 2.78 per cent in some work in addition to their household duties; and 1.65 in some work besides going to school. Special remark is made upon the small proportion of women working at gainful occupations. The average weekly earnings of persons reporting were $5.9312, the highest $7.6412, and the average number of hours per week was fifty-nine. The number of illiterate persons was 2,752. Questions were asked of the housekeepers whether they had baked bread, spun, sewed, knit stockings, or worked in the fields, in this country and in Italy. In each case a considerable number were found who had done one or more of these things in Italy and ceased to do them here. Three hundred and five persons had sent the aggregate amount of $19,384, or an average of $63.56 each, to bring relatives from Italy; 9 had invested $2,440 in land in Italy and 76 had invested $260,665—or an average of $3,430 each, in land in the United States. Three hundred and ten—271 men and 39 women—had visited Italy since coming here—some of them twice, three, four, and even five times.

We have from George H. Barton, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Report B on the Scientific Work of the Boston Party of the Sixth Peary Expedition to Greenland, detailing glacial observations in the Umanak District, Greenland, well illustrated.

In Crusoe's Island, of Appletons' Home Reading Book Series, we have geography, travel, criticism, natural history, adventure, and notes of human traits, all combined in a single small, interesting, and instructive volume. The author, Frederick A. Ober, having visited the Antilles to study birds under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution, became desirous of learning more about those attractive regions. With this desire occurred to him the determination to search out the truth respecting Robinson Crusoe, or rather respecting the spot which Defoe had in view in describing the scene of his great story. In this book he proffers a description of what he believes is "the veritable island in which Robinson Crusoe lived his lonely life, the scene of his wreck, his cave, his bower, his Man Friday; the birds and trees he saw or ought to have seen, together with the author's own experience." Various quotations from Crusoe have been used, which, together with the internal evidence of the book itself, seem to show conclusively that "the island of his exile was not Juan Fernandez in the Pacific Ocean, but Tobago in the Caribbean Sea, not far distant from the north coast of South America"; and Man Friday was a Carib from Trinidad. This, however, is not all the book. The Nature sketches, the tropical pictures, the descriptions of birds, the account of the Caribs, and the adventures, constitute of themselves a story of rare interest.


PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED.

Agricultural Experiment Stations. Reports and bulletins. Cornell University: No. 144. Notes on Spraying and on the San José Scale. By H. P. Gould. Pp. 16; No. 145. Some Important Pear Diseases. By B. M. Duggar. Pp. 32.—Delaware College: No. 36. Potash. Pp. 24; No. 38. Anthrax. Pp. 10; No. 39. Sorghum. By C. L. Penny. Pp. 23.—Michigan State Agricultural College: No. 151-153. Small Fruits and Vegetables. Pp. 96; Nos. 155 and 156. Spraying, and Nurseries and Orchards. Pp. 32; No. 154. Corn Raising. By C. D. Smith, Director. Pp. 24.—Montana: No. 15. Larkspur Poisoning of Sheep. Pp. 16, with plates.—New Hampshire College: No. 48. Ninth Annual Report. By Charles S. Murkland. Pp. 32; No. 49. Inspection of Fertilizers. Pp. 18.—Ohio: No. 84. Sixteenth Annual Report. Pp. 72; No. 90. Sugar-Beet Investigations. Pp. 42; Newspaper Bulletin on Arsenite of Soda. Pp. 2.—Purdue University: No. 68. The Sugar Beet in Indiana; No. 69. Insecticides, Fungicides, and Spraying. Pp. 8.—United States Department of Agriculture: Recent Laws against Injurious Insects, etc. By L. O. Howard, entomologist. Pp. 68; The Cultivated Vetches. Pp. 8; Climate and Crop Service, North Dakota Section. Pp. 8; Miscellaneous Results of the Work of the Division of Entomology. Pp. 100.—University of Illinois: No. 49. The Sugar Beet in Illinois. Pp. 52; No. 50. Cost of Production of Corn and Oats in 1896. Pp. 24.—University of Kansas (Department of Entomology): Scale Insects Injurious to Orchards. Pp. 62.

Bailey, L. H. The Pruning Book, a Monograph of the Pruning and Training of Plants as applied to American Conditions. The Macmillan Company. Pp. 5 7. $1.50.

Beauchamp, W. M. Polished Stone Weapons used by the New York Aborigines before and during European Occupation. New York State Museum, Albany. Pp. 102.

Blakiston, Son & Co., Philadelphia. Books on Medicine and Allied Sciences published during 1896, 1897, and 1898. Pp. 32.