these labors have been published piece-meal, in the newspaper and periodical press, during the last quarter of a century; but of late these scattered fragments have been gathered and published in formal treatises. We have heretofore directed the attention of our readers to two of these Philological Studies, and the Latin Analyst ;-we now present them with a third treatise, and the one which is, perhaps, the most important of all. The object of this treatise we may explain as follows : The words of language, as they exist in the forms which are employed in speech, are to be regarded as products or outgrowths of primary original elements,. Words exist in what may be called natural families, and these primary elements without being words themselves, furnish the common materiel out of which the whole family has grown. Philologists compare language in its words and in its elements, to a tree, of which the root and stem represent the common elements, and the branches, the words which are actually used in speech. Thus, language is made up of roots and stems on the one hand, and of families of words growing out from the roots and stems on the other. This is found to be a fact so general as to imply a corresponding law through which it has come to pass. Moreover, the outgrowth of families of words from roots and stems is not accidental, but is controlled by law. The modes in which words are thus formed, have been investigated and classified. Words, then, are formed from roots and stems, either by internal changes, or by external additions. The internal changes are either, what Prof. Gibbs calls, the play of the vowel sounds, or their modifications. The additions are either at the beginning, or at the end of words, by affixes or suffixes. The different affixes and suffixes express the relations in which the several branches of a family of words stand to each other. Now if a person should ascertain with scientific accuracy the pure root of any given family of words, and should then be able to trace out the modes through which the several branches of the family had grown out of this root, and to determine that the distinct relations of the several branches to the whole family had been expressed by the appropriate vowel changes, or the proper affixes and suffixes, he would have a complete knowledge, and that a scientific one, of that family of words-unless it might be, he could not determine why that individual root had that particular signification. He would have a complete genealogy of that family of words, and if he could ascertain the same thing as to the other families, a complete his tory of the language. aims to reach. Such is the ideal which the scientific philologist Now, in view of this explanation, we can state definitely what the reader will find in this new work of Prof. Gibbs. He will find there, a list of the Teutonic Roots and Stems of the English language, and as founded on this, the several modes through which the existing families of words have been formed. He, of course, will not find the families of words themselves, or, perhaps, any one family, but the modes through which any one word must have been formed. This is the grand feature of the book-there are other things, but we must omit them. This volume, small as it is, must have cost immense labor. To find the pure or original form of the root requires extensive research. It may be necessary to seek for it in various languages. You may hunt after it in the Anglo-Saxon, or the Maeso Gothic, or the Latin or the Greek, and not find it, for it has been preserved only in the Sanscrit, or the Sanscrit may have lost it, while the Anglo-Saxon shall have retained it. For these several languages are not derived from each other, but each is the equal of the other, and may have kept what the others have lost. So, too, the branches of the same family of words are not to be found in any one language; they have to be sought in all the cognate languages, and the various portions to be brought together and readjusted. Nowhere, we venture to say, has this arduous labor been performed for the English language, so accurately and scientifically as in the present volume. Obviously, what is needed in such a work is comprehensiveness of knowledge, and accuracy of statement and arrangement; both of these we have in the present volume. What has been done will not need to be done over again. We commend, therefore, the volume to the attention of our readers, and trust the patience of the author will not be exhausted in waiting for that appreciation of the work which it merits, and will receive. SCIENCE. GLACIERS OF THE ALPS.*-Whoever would take in, by the mind's eye, *The Glaciers of the Alps. Being a Narrative of Excursions and Ascents, an account of the origin and phenomena of Glaciers, and an exposition of the physical principles to which they are related. By JOHN TYNDALL, F. R. S., Member of the Royal Societies of Holland and Göttingen, etc., etc., Professor of Natural Philosophy in the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and in the Government School of Mines. With Illustrations. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1860. pp. 446. $1.50. [T. H. Pease, New Haven.] a most captivating picture of a man of true science grappling with a great problem in nature, and, at the same time, catch something of his inspiration, and enrich his own stores of knowledge with the results of an important scientific investigation, should read the volume of Prof. Tyndall on the Glaciers of the Alps, just issued from the press of Ticknor & Fields, Boston. The questions to which this distinguished physicist here addresses himself are not of mere local interest, nor confined in their bearings to phenomena observed among the Alps. The immense beds of gravel and sand, called drift, which cover large portions of the continents, together with certain phenomena of grooved and polished rocks and transported boulders observed in New England, as well as in other parts of our own continent and of the globe, have been supposed to owe their origin to the action of ancient glaciers, at a period when the temperature and physical geography of the globe were both widely different from what they are at present. Hence, the facts and philosophy of glacier action have, for many years past, received a large share of attention among men of science, particularly geologists, and the many difficult questions growing out of the phenomena observed, have been discussed with the liveliest interest, both in this country and in Europe. The fact, also, that a sublime theater of glacier action, where all the phenomena are exhibited on a grand scale, lies in the very heart of Europe, and is the constant resort of both scientific and fashionable tourists from all parts of the civilized world, has tended to give a popular interest to the subject, which it might not otherwise have possessed. No book can be better adapted to satisfy both scientific and popular curiosity in respect to these questions, than this of Prof. Tyndall's. It is conveniently divided into two parts; first, the Narrative, occupying half the volume, in which are given with much force and fidelity of description, the details of the author's personal explorations and adventures among the Alps during the summers of the last four or five years -including two perilous ascents of Mont Blanc and two of Monte Rosa, with a winter expedition to the Mer de Glace; and, secondly, the Scientific matter, filling the remainder of the volume, in which are contained fuller details of observations and measurements, with discussions of theories, and expositions of the principles of physics to which the phenomena are related. This second part is totally different in character from the repulsive appendices of dry figures and formule which so often accompany Narratives of Exploration, and which none but the hardiest of scientific cormorants care to taste, or are able to digest. Let no one, then, however unscientific, cheat himself out of the enjoyment of this most attractive portion of the book, by imagining it to have been intended for another class of readers. Prof. Tyndall has the rare faculty of being able to render the most abstruse principles of science clear and attractive to every capacity, and we know not where the reader can turn for a more simple and intelligible exposition of some of the fundamental principles of physics, particularly the nature and relations of light and heat, than to these luminous pages. Nor less intelligible and attractive is the author's discussion of rival theories, and advocacy of his own. These theories pertain chiefly to the motion of glaciers;-for science has not only discovered the fact, but aims to explain it, that the glaciers are in motion. Coleridge stood among the icy solitudes of the Alps in the mood of a poet, rather than of a prying physicist, when, in that sublime anthem, the "Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamouni," he apostrophizes the glaciers of Mont Blanc as impressing the soul mainly with the idea of awful silence and immovable fixity. "Ye ice-falls! ye that from the mountain's brow, To the ear of science, however, these silent cataracts, in making their mad plunge, crackle and crash with the noise of earthquake or of thunder, as their fathomless depths of rigid ice are broken asunder, into innumerable chasms and ridges. And these "motionless torrents" are shown by Prof. Tyndall's theodolite to be really in perpetual motion, winding their way down the mountain gorges with a velocity ranging from one to two, or even three feet in every twentyfour hours. They are shown, by the Professor's logic, moreover, notwithstanding their seeming rigidity and vitreous density, to be in fact veritable ice-rivers, flowing, like all other rivers, faster in the middle than at the sides, and faster at top than at bottom, with the line of swiftest current not always in the middle, but, as in all serpentine streams, shifting alternately from side to side, according to the windings of the banks, so as to form deeper sinuosities than the banks themselves. In discussing the theories of Glacier-motion, Prof. Tyndall passes in review, with a dispassionate but searching criticism, the "dilation " theory of Charpentier, the "sliding" theory of De Saussure, the "viscous" theory of Prof. Forbes, the "plasticity" theory of Prof. J. Thompson, and the "pressure" theory of Bishop Rendu, adopting the latter as the basis of his own, and expanding it into a consistent and apparently philosophical explanation of all the leading phenomena of glacier motion. This theory we have not here room to explain-but as a leading feature, it attributes glacier-motion to the effect of gravity or pressure— the weight of the mass above altering the form and relative position of the portions below, and forcing them to yield gradually in the direc tion of least resistance, or down the valleys, as in the case of other streams. Various other phenomena connected with glaciers, besides their motion, are also discussed in this volume with great ability, and the whole subject is presented with a degree of lucidness and completeness, which leaves little to be desired, either by the man of science or the general reader. ANSWER TO HUGH MILLER.*-A notice of this book, quite extendedmore extended than its merits, (though not, perhaps, than its demerits) deserve was prepared for our last Number, but unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, it somehow got lost, probably among the rubbish of the printing office; and on "sober second thought," instead of “making game" of the book, we deem it sufficient simply to say that it is worthless a book indicating indeed, on the part of its author, a sincere desire to defend the Bible from harm, but itself remarkably mal apropos as a means of doing it. A book that holds Geology to be a humbug and Geologists infidels, that teaches that "stones grow," and that fossils were created in the rocks just as they are, yet, that in their present condition, they are an independent order of creatures, having a distinct life and province of their own-in short, that fossils beget fossils,—a book that soberly, and in italics, stakes the credit of the Bible on this contingency" that if the pre-Adamite fossils were preceded by vegetable and animal life, then the Mosaic account, the fourth commandment, and the Biblical dependencies upon them, are unworthy of consideration, and are of necessity untrue as the foundation of Biblical and Christian faith;" a book, finally, which holds that the "ignorance" of Geologists and theologians, "has been and still is a towering avalanche of * Answer to Hugh Miller and Theoretic Geologists. By THOMAS A. Davies, Author of "Cosmogony or Mysteries of Creation," &c. New York: Rudd & Carlton, 130 Grand street. 1860. pp. 302. |