(1) Polar Exploration (2) The Evolution of Plants (3) Modern Geography

Abstract

THE three volumes the titles of which are given above belong to the Home University Library of Modern Knowledge, published by Messrs. Williams and Norgate under the editorship of Prof. Murray, Mr. Herbert Fisher, and Prof. J. Arthur Thomson. Each is intended to be a concise handbook to the subject with which it deals, and by an acknowledged authority. The object of the series is to place within everyone's reach, at the lowest possible price, authoritative information on any branch of history, science, art, literature, philosophy, or religion with which he desires to become acquainted. Ten volumes will be issued each year. The first on our list, “Polar Exploration,” by Dr. Bruce, is what the author has termed a “traveller's sample” of the Arctic and Antarctic warehouses. No one is more competent to present their contents than one who has personally sampled as he has done, more than once, both polar regions, and has besides learned much in regard to them from personal conversations and correspondence during the past twenty years with living polar explorers, including the veteran Sir Joseph Hooker, to whom the volume is dedicated. The personal note predominates, as it needs must, and those parts visited by the author are dealt with in greater detail than those which he has not had an opportunity of visiting. The aspects of the subject dealt with in the present volume are the astronomical features of the polar regions; the ice, both land and sea, its coloration and that of snow; the vegetation, the animal life and the physics of these regions; their meteorology, magnetism, aurora, and tides, with a final chapter on the aims and objects of modern polar exploration. Not the least important addition to the physics of the southern seas made by the Scottish national Antarctic expedition wTas the discovery of the existence of a long “rise” extending in a curve from Madagascar via Bouvet Island, the Sandwich group, the South Orkneys, Graham Land, and the Falklands to South America. “Thus Antarctica, South America, and Madagascar and probably South Africa become connected with one another in a most direct manner by this rise.” The volume smacks of a Stevensonian voyage.

(1) Polar Exploration.

By Dr. W. S. Bruce. Pp. 256. (Home University Library of Modern Knowledge.) (London: Williams and Norgate, n.d.) Price 1s. net each.

(2) The Evolution of Plants.

By Dr. D. H. Scott, F.R.S. Pp. 256. (Home University Library of Modern Knowledge.) (London: Williams and Norgate, n.d.) Price 1s. net each.

(3) Modern Geography.

By Dr. M. I. Newbigin. Pp. 256. (Home University Library of Modern Knowledge.) (London: Williams and Norgate, n.d.) Price 1s. net each.