Miscellany

Abstract

THIS is a collection of notes and essays of ‘popular science’ which is actually both popular and on the whole scientific. Mr. Crowther has a chatty, interesting style, the gift of making fairly complex matters readily understood, and a true journalistic instinct for the arresting phrase. The title of the book, “Osiris and the Atom”, is an example of the latter; the contest for the soul between the forces of life and death in ancient Egypt is the root idea from which ball games have developed, and the peculiarities of bounding and spinning balls provide useful analogies in the study of atoms. Thephrase also expresses aptly the wide range of the book—the great Siberian meteorite, human biology, the structure of wool fibres, modern advances in engineering, Thames floods, terrestrial magnetism, the constitution of the stars, viruses and vitamins.

Osiris and the Atom.

By J. G. Crowther. Pp. viii + 221 + 4 plates. (London: George Rout-ledge and Sons, Ltd., 1932.) 5s. net.