LIBRARY TABLE.

218 River which was attributed to defective vision on the part of the pilot. On examination the pilot’s eyes were found to be free from coarse lesion, but that he could only see at 20 feet objects which are by most men seen at 100 feet. With correcting glasses vision could be brought up to %8-. He was not in the habit of wearing glasses and it was not necessary that he should read letters on the boats ; but the question turned upon the point as to whether a man with 1 s vision could see a coloured lightfar enough to be able to avoid collision. No very precise answer, it appears, could be given. The successive chapters of the work deal with presbyopia, myopia, hypermetropia, astigmatism, and a3thenopia, the concluding one containing general remarks upon lenses. Dr. Roosa remarks that a not inconsiderable number of persons from motives of vanity put off what is called the evil day of wearing glasses until they are reminded, as was Mr. Rufus Choate by the learned judge while he was struggling to get his manuscript at a point safficiently distant to enable him to read it, that it would be better to get a pair of tongs to hold the papers or a pair Dr. Roosa’s work is of glasses by which to read them. written in a simple style and contains many useful hints for those who require glasses.

LIBRARY TABLE. Shado7v Test) in the -Deteri7tination of at One Meter Distance with the Plane Mirror. By JAMES TxoRmGrov, M.D., Assistant Surgeon to Wills Eye Hospital. Third edition, revised and enlarged. With

Retinoseopy (or

Refraction

43 Illustrations, 12 of which are coloured. London: H. Kimpton. 1899. Pp. 86. Price 5s. net.-The author of this little work claims for retinoscopy that with an eye otherwise normal except for its refractive error and being under the influence of a reliable cycloplegic there is no more accurate objective method of obtaining its exact correction than by retinoscopy. The principal objection to this method of determining the refraction of the eye is undoubtedly the necessity for the use of a cycloplegic if accurate results are to be obtained, but there can be no question of its value in the case of children, illiterates, and others, since the physician obtains his data for correction without any demand on the intelligence of his patient. The author recommends the use of a five-millimetre opening for the source of light which should be placed five or six inches to the left and in front of the observer, and remarks judiciously that any observer whose vision does not approximate 6 will not get much satisfaction from retinoscopy. The principle of this method of observation and the details of the proceedings to obtain good results are very clearly and intelligently described.

Fry’s Lasv of raccination. Seventh edition. By A. F. London : Knight and Co. 1899.—Mr. Fry’s VuLLlAMY. little book upon the Vaccination Acts has been long before the public and is now well known to those whom it concerns, as the appearance of a severth edition testifies. Public vaccinators, magistrates’ clerks, and others engaged in administering the law upon this subject will find it convenient to have the statutes and Local Government Board circulars in the compact form in which they are here presented and illustrated by notes and an index. The introductory chapter also contains much matter of general interest and carries on very efficiently in the direction of statistical information the lines of Mr. Fry’s earlier work. The main results of the investigation into the whole subject by the Royal Commission appointed in’ 1889 are in this way made very accessible and should prove of interest to a larger circle than that of purely professional readers. The book which is excellently printed and got up is disfigured by the introduction behind the table of contents and immediately in front of the introductory chapter of

four pages of the publisher’s advertisements. The offending advertisers would no doubt plead that the advertisements relate exclusively to forms and other documents germane tothe subject of the book. That, however, seems to us a very insufficient apology for the intrusion of a trade circular into the midst of a technical work. It marks a great falling offin the present edition from the standard of former editions. of the book. The Ineb’l’iates Acts. By WYATT PAINE. London : Sweet anc Maxwell, Limited. 1899.-This book contains the text of th& statutes relating to the custody and treatment of habitual drunkards, arranged to facilitate reference and illustrated with notes. The compilation is preceded by an introductory chapter in which the legal and to some extent the moral aspects of inebriety are discussed. This discussion is, however, very general in its scope and not intended to deal exhaustively with the subject or pointedly with the casesupon which the law relating to inebriety has a bearing. It is. intended therefore to serve rather as a guide to the sources of information than as itself a repertory of legal doctrine, and’ considered from this point of view its references are noticeably few and its purpose only imperfectly fulfilled. Mr. Paine does not affect literary style at all and it is perhaps. hypercritical to be fastidious about the English of a technical book, but we confess that it offends us. to find the author invariably using the expression"alcoholic liquids"" when he means only what we. usually term " alcoholic Zi7tors," and not even thelicence of inelegancy fairly claimable by the writer of a text-book can excuse the inaccuracy of such utterances as. "persons addicted to alcoltolisnt are subject to sudden death by coma" or " the time is ripe for the State to regulate theresults of the abuse of alcoholic liquids." A sentence soincorrect as this last quoted one is positively hard to beunderstood and probably indicates the existence in the’ writer’s mind of two ideas which he has not been at thepains to disentangle, one being that the legislature ought tointerfere in order to mitigate the results of the abuse of alcohol, the other that its interference should not stop at. results but be directed also to counteract the abuse itself. The book as it stands will serve a useful purpose, for the statutes are collected, arranged, indexed, and illustrated as above mentioned with notes, but a little more trouble upom the details of its preparation would have been well bestowed.

B. Bradshaw’s

London : Kegan Paul, Price 28. 6d.-The1899. preface to this useful little book expresses the hope of the proprietors that the "present edition will be found tobe greatly improved as they have spared no trouble or expense to bring it up to date and make it reliable." Sofar as we can judge the hope is justified. We are glad to. see that the editor has deleted 11 cyanosis " from the list of diseases, but he still retains "jaundice," which is no more a disease than is cyanosis.

l3cct3ting places.

Trench, Trubner, and Co.

JOURNALS. The Journal of State Medicine. Vol. vii., No. 7. July, 1899. London : Baillière, Tindall, and Cox. Price 2s.-Th& original contributions to this number consist in the main of papers, or abstracts thereof, read at last year’s Congress of the Royal Institute of Public Health and elsewhere. They comprise, amongst others, an abstract of a paper by the architect of the London School Board on the Planning andt Construction of Board Schools, and a paper by the chief sanitary inspector of Torquay upon the Training of Sanitary Inspectors. Dr. R. B. Mahon writes from practical experiences in Ireland on the Causes and Management of Outbreaks of Typhus Fever in Rural Districts. No small portion of the remainder of the volume is devoted to an account of the annual dinner of the Royal Institute of