THE DESTINIES OF THE STARS. By Svante Arrhenius, Ph.D., President, Nobel Institute, Stockholm, Sweden (Recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1903). Authorized translation from the Swedish by J. E. Fries, Fellow A. I. E. E. Illustrated. G. P. Putnam's Sons. New York and London. 1918. xiii and 256 pages Price $1.50.

In his latest book, which has now been made available to the English reader in a careful translation by J. E. Fries, Svante Arrhenius adds another chain of essays to those he has already given us in his earlier works Världarnas Utveckling (The Development of the Worlds) and Människan inför Världsgåtan (Man Before the World Riddle). The author this time chooses a somewhat narrower field, confining himself to the nearest stars, the planets, and the moon. In fact, his book might have been entitled "The Destinies of the Planets."

The first essay shows how modern astronomy has developed out of that half religious, half superstitious study of the regular heavenly phenomena which was necessary even in a very primitive age as a means of measuring time. The next deals with the modern theories of the Milky Way as a spiral nebula, and in the following chapters the author gives an exposition of the meterological and geological importance of the cooling stars. He devotes a whole chapter to Mars, coldly and systematically knocking the props away under any belief in the existence of the "highly intelligent men and marvellous engineers" with whom the imaginations of Flammarion and Lowell have populated the red planet. Arrhenius declares that the much discussed "canals" on Mars are merely cracks in the cooling crust of the dying planet and that, owing to low temperature, no life can exist there, except possibly the lowest kind of snow algae, and finally he suggests, with a trace of sarcasm, that cooler logic and less preconception would be beneficial in the study of Mars.

Mars, Mercury, and the moon represent three different kinds of cosmic death; from the fate of these stars Arrhenius reads dire prophecies dooming our earth to a similar fate. It is not a very agreeable picture he draws of the future of our dear planet. With oceans frozen to the bottom, with continents turned into vast deserts swept by devastating sand-storms, devoid of every trace of organic life and finally mummified under a deep cover of green meteoric dust, the earth will continue to revolve in its orbit through trillions of years to come, visible only by the ghastly blueish green light reflected from it.

Meanwhile a new dawn may break in our solar system from cloud-covered, rain-dripping Venus, when she has cooled down sufficiently to allow higher form of life to develop. Possibly there are even now giant ferns and other lower plants growing in the hot-house atmosphere of her swamps and in their decay building up layers of coal, from which some day another breed of intelligent beings may grow to consider themselves the masters of the world. EDY. VELANDER.

THE SOUL OF DENMARK. By Shaw Desmond. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1918. 277 pp. Price $3.00.

The impression left by this book is that Denmark has no soul, or none to speak of; that if she once had one, it has been smothered in good living, stunted by the sense of her littleness, warped by the fear of being ridiculous. Mr. Shaw Desmond thinks that the great events of the war may have awakened Denmark's soul; he instances the increased church attendance and the run on fortune-tellers as obverse sides of the same impulse; but again he dashes our hopes by the one word goulash and all that it stands for.

At the risk of being ponderous, which Mr. Shaw Desmond never is except in

his title, one would like to ask: what is soul anyway? If soul is temperament, then of course the phlegmatic Dane must be found lacking, especially if compared to the Celt. But if soul has anything to do with the power of devotion to an ideal, with aspirations toward goodness and justice, with sensitiveness to beauty, and strength of loving, the comparison might not be all unfavorable to the Dane. What, for instance, has kept the South Jutlanders Danes through all these years of persecution? Is it not something that smacks of soul?

The author claims that the Danish language has no equivalent for spiritual, and says that when he attempted to use the word, his listeners stared at him in blank amazement. This is not to be wondered at if he translated it with aandelig, which in common usage has come to mean pietistical. On the other hand, a Dane might retort that English has no equivalent for aand or its adjectives aandrig and aandfuld, all implying intellect with a breath of soul. Or he might remind the Irishman that, in English, the word soulful is a jibe whereas among Scandinavians sjaelfuld is the very highest praise of an individual or a work of art. Mr. Shaw Desmond describes the spiritless singing in Danish assemblies. A Dane might reply that no people are more given to singing as they go about their daily work and none have lovelier songs. An attempt to discuss the soul of Denmark without considering either her folk-songs or the great masters of her literature is necessarily inadequate, and this is partly the reason why Mr. Shaw Desmond's book, clever and sympathetic though it is, falls short of, for instance, the really aandrig book on Sweden by a French writer, André Bellesort.

If the author had not chosen to emphasize his argument by the title, perhaps his charming picture of the surface aspects of Danish life would have been the part of the book that lingered longest in the memory. He has a fine appreciation of the personal democracy which is carried almost to perfection in Denmark, and he revels in the Danish hygge. He disposes-would it might be forever!of the fierce, blue-eyed viking that still strides through the imagination of other peoples when they speak of Scandinavia, and shows the Danes in the pleasant virtues and vices that differentiate them from Norwegians and Swedes as well as from Anglo-Saxons, as lovers of life, intellectually curious, fond of good talk and good food and soft living, disposed to round off the sharp corners of life, and, above all, devoted to the cult of amusement-at more sig!

On the whole, the book is chatty and readable and only irritating enough to be stimulating. H. A. L.

NORMAN INSTITUTIONS. By Charles Homer Haskins.
University Press. Price $2.75.

Cambridge: Harvard

The invasion and conquest of England by the Normans in the eleventh century is one of the great landmarks in the history of the world. An alien aristocracy seized the government and the resources of the English nation and forced the currents of English national life into new channels. The influence of the Norman settlement extended into many fields, though it is perhaps most evident in the matter of institutional growth. It is, however, very difficult to determine precisely what the Normans contributed to the English constitution; much energy has been spent in efforts to determine whether such institutions as the exchequer or the jury are of Norman or of English origin.

Many of these problems have been brought nearer to a satisfactory solution by the researches of Professor Charles H. Haskins, dean of the graduate school of Harvard University, who for the last twenty years has devoted much of his time to the study of Norman documents. It will be remembered that in 1915 Professor Haskins published a work on The Normans in European History, in which he traced the career of this marvelous people in their various fields of activity. The present work is a study of the institutional changes and progress

under the several Norman dukes from the accession of William the Conqueror to the death of Henry II. A separate chapter is devoted to a discussion of the Norman jury.

The documentary materials for the study of the institutional arrangements of the tenth century have been destroyed, if they ever existed; and Professor Haskins has consequently not been able to throw much light on the probable Scandinavian origin of some of these arrangements. The traces of Northern influence that he has discovered are slight; he finds certain customs relating to the enforcement of outlawry and the protection of the plow by the Norman duke, which apparently go back into Scandinavian history. A comparative study of Norman customs and the later Scandinavian codes may yield further information on this point, but so far as the writer is informed no such study has as yet been undertaken L. M. L.

MY ANTONIA. By Willa Sibert Cather. With Illustrations by W. T. Benda. Boston and New York. Houghton Miffin Company. 1918. xiii and 419 pp.

Price $1.€0.

Miss Cather has given us two Swedish heroines, both daughters of the pioneer Middle West, which she knows so well. In My Antonia the setting is the same, though the heroine is a Bohemian girl of the rich, full-blooded type that is made to be the mother of young races. We were about to write an appreciation of Miss Cather's book, when a review by H. T. F. in the Atlantic Monthly came into our hands and seemed to express what we had to say so well that we prefer to quote from it:

"Miss Cather's Americanism is her belief in the 'foreigner' and in the absorption by America of the stanch moral qualities of the pioneer immigrant. These qualities the immigrant brought, it is true, along with his red-handkerchief bundle; but his new life strengthened them an hundredfold, to the immense profit of his sons and daughters and of American industry and agriculture generally.

"To show what stuff Americanism is made of, Miss Cather chooses a background which she knows well-the Nebraska prairie country. It is a glorious land, in which one feels 'motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping.' But it is also obdurate and grudging. In it the author places a group of immigrants who, giving all that is in them, force even prosperity out of the unwilling soil. One of Miss Cather's points is that some of them had more to give than the native settlers had; and the result helps prove her point, for 'to-day the best that a harassed Black Hawk merchant can hope for is to sell provisions and farm-machinery and automobiles to the rich farms where that first crop of stalwart Bohemian and Scandinavian girls are now the mistresses.' The reader follows Miss Cather's enthusiasms, and says with Frances Harling, 'You always put a kind of glamour over them [the country girls]. The trouble with you is that you're

romantic.'

"My Antonia is, then, a book of enthusiasms, a collection of tales, anecdotes, and odds and ends of human tragedy, all bearing directly or indirectly on the immigrant and his thoroughgoing tussle with life. The shortcomings of native settlers lend cogency to the plain implication that the immigrants' moral and physical contributions are among the essential, the enduring gifts to the nation and the race."

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The American Scandinavian Foundation

Appointment of Traveling Fellows and Scholars for the Academic Year 1919-1920

FELLOWS

From Sweden

ERNST FOLKE GRANGE, civil engineer, to study road and bridge building. SVEN INGVAR, M.D., to study histological neurology at the University of Chicago.

From Norway

AKSEL ANDERSEN, assistant at the Trondhjem Institute of Technology, to study iron and concrete construction.

ERIK HARILDSTAD, teacher in the Christiania School for the Blind, to study pedagogy in institutions for the blind.

Honorary (without stipend)

HERMAN DEDICHEN (Honorary Fellow for 1918-1919) to continue his research work in the bi-products of cellulose at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

LUDVIG FJÆRLI, Secretary in the Trondhjem Institute of Technology, to study economics.

From Denmark

ANDERS KRISTIAN BAK, master of science, to study combustion and thermodynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

HUGO FRICKE, master of arts, to study physics, especially Roentgen rays at Harvard and other universities.

Honorary (without stipend)

T. U. H. ELLINGER, master of science, to study heredity in the breeding of domestic plants and animals at Johns Hopkins University.

From the United States

KEMP MALONE, teacher, to study Icelandic literature, and to assemble material for an historical grammar of that language at Reykjavik. IRMA C. LONEGREN, bachelor in sociology at Bryn Mawr College, to study sociology at Uppsala University.

INGA M. BREDESEN, teacher, Central High School, Minneapolis, to study the Norwegian language and literature at the University of Christiania.

ADDITIONAL STIPENDS

KAREN LARSEN, instructor in history at Mt. Holyoke College, to devote the summer to continuing her study of Slesvig under Prussian Rule, at Columbia University.

THE PUBLICATIONS of the Society for the Advancement of Scandinavian Study.

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