tion as well as absolutely correct. Everything pertaining to the chronograph must work harmoniously. The battery should be of a known power, and the current flow with a continuous regularity. The wires at the muzzle of the gun should be of the same thickness, and the muzzle of the weapon itself at precisely the same distance from the target at each discharge. A foot variation in this respect would make a surprising difference in the time of the flight of the load when we consider that with a velocity of say 900 to 940 feet per second an ounce and a quarter of shot will travel thirty yards in a little less than the eleventh part of a second. Eight hundred and fifty feet per second is a developed force great enough to kill any game for which the shotgun is intended, and anything beyond this is, of course, advantageous, adding, as it surely does, to the power of the gun,- providing always that to obtain the higher velocities the breech pressure is kept far below the bursting strain.

The pigeon shooter desires above all things what is called a killing load, and is constantly studying to increase the power of his gun. Hence he uses a charge proportioned to develop the greatest force to the shot charge. At the pigeon shootings of today the average velocity is undoubtedly 920 to 945 feet per second for thirty yards. Twelve to fifteen years ago a score of seventy-five to eighty-five pigeons out of one hundred was considered most excellent, and it was only the experts of that time who could score so high. Today such scorers would not win, for, with the improved ammunition and the modern hammerless gun, ninety to ninety-five per cent of the birds killed is considered a top score.

For inanimate target shooting high velocities are not considered indispensable.

Since we have spoken of velocities, it may be instructive to know something. of pressures at the breech of the shell chamber, at which point the greatest strain in the barrel is usually exerted at the instant of discharge. As it is impossible in the space here allowed, to print the tables necessary for comparison with all the powders, we must simply be satisfied with an illustration.

Taking for instance five shots each, of the Dupont, E. C., and Gold Dust powders, with the shells wadded to obtain fair velocities for most any purpose pertaining to field and trap shooting, Dupont gave 879 feet velocity with 7440 pounds bursting strain, the load being 34 drams or 40 grains, and 11⁄2 ounce of No. 7 shot. E. C. gave 851 feet velocity with 7584 pounds bursting strain, the load being 34 drams or 44 grains and 1% ounce of No. 7 shot. Gold Dust gave 928 feet velocity, with a pressure at the breech of 5266 pounds, the load being 2 drams or 45 grains with 1% ounces of No. 7 shot.

The chronographic readings on the Dupont and E. C. herein mentioned, were taken at random from a report published in a recent Forest and Stream. The chronographic and pressure gauge readings on the Gold Dust are taken at random from a report at the office of the United States Smokeless Powder Company. By changing the wadding to thin, thick, extra thick, or combining same; decreasing or increasing the shot charge, using more or less powder in connection with the multitude of styles of wadding, the pressures and velocities velocities are directly

affected thereby,- fifty grains of E. C. will give, say, a pressure of 7000 pounds and a compensating velocity of 930 to 945 feet 1% ounce No. 7 shot. Dupont

and Gold Dust will do the same if the quantity of powder and number and quality of wads is used to produce the same results as nearly as possible.

W. L. Colville.

(ETC

ETC)

The Criminal Press.

IF THE good people that have done so good a work against the obscene pictures and penny-dreadful in art and literature would only turn their eyes on the columns of the San Francisco press, they would discover a state of things that should call for their earnest condemnation. How many thousand upon thousands of words and dozens of drawings the Chronicle, Examiner, and Call, have devoted to the trial of the man Durrant we will not even waste a guess. Suffice to say that for a month we have been glutted with the history of a bloody crime, which in small boys' and gushing girls' eyes has become through its newspaper notoriety an act of heroism. The intelligent public has been ignored and the news of the world sacrificed that the scandal-loving, sensation-seeking readers may have their fill. But this is not the worst phase of the question. It is the effect that the narration of crime always has on young and weak minds. Nothing worse appears in the Police Gazette of New York or the Police News of London than what appears from day to day in the city press re the Durrant Trial, and yet the United States mails refuse to carry either of these papers. Purveyors of criminal garbage should be as subject to the law as the hawker of

obscene prints. The devoting of two whole pages a day to a crime, repeated day after day, illustrated in every detail as carefully as a church wedding, magnifies the crime until it becomes honorable. We need censors of the press with power to impose fines large enough to make such exhibitions unprofitable. A Sunday school lesson once a week can do little to combat such broadcast demoralization. It is no excuse for an educated newspaper owner to plead that his paper is what the public makes it. Durrant might hide behind the same specious argument. As long as filth pays better than cleanliness the newspapers will pander to the filthy.

The Silver Knights.

UNITED STATES Senator William M. Stewart, the leader of the Silver Party in Congress, has organized a secret society styled the "Silver Knights of America," of which he is President. Its organ is The Silver Knight, published in Washington, of which Senator Stewart appears not only as editor but chief editorial writer. The plan of the society is outlined in the Silver Knight :—

TO THE PUBLIC:-This Order was organized for the purpose of combining into one great organization those of our citizens who are in favor

of the equal coinage of gold and silver, as was provided for in the laws in force prior to the demonetization act of 1873. It is nonpartisan as to party politics and aims to work through all political parties.

Then the argument following goes on to sum up the situation very concisely:

The election occurring in 1896 will substantially settle the condition of all industrial pursuits in this country. If we can succeed in electing a Congress and a President who are in favor of the rehabilitation of silver to equal coinage, it will insure to this country a period of financial prosperity which it has not known for over twenty years.

If the single gold standard party shall succeed in electing a President and Congress favorable to their ideas, the doom of liberty will be sealed. Give them four years more intrenchment in power and they will have destroyed the people to the extent that by impoverishment, want, hunger, the citizen will have largely lost his individuality; his independence will have waned, and a condition gradually sinking to serfdom will have taken possession of his mind, and as hard times continue, hunger and want becoming the familiar companion of the family hearthstone, liberty will die, and with it will be established a moneyed aristocracy which will own the body of labor. The picture of an English mother, working at an iron forge, hammering iron and making nails from early dawn to late at night,

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If the Silver Party honestly believes that the above will be the condition of affairs after '96 in case a gold-bug" is made President, they will do well to choose carefully their standard bearers for the campaign. Unknown men like their mushroom candidate Sibley of Pennsylvania, freaks like Peffer of Kansas, cranks like Waite of Colorado, or demagogues like Altgeldt of Illinois, will only bring their fond dreams to the earth and the realities of ridicule. Let them nominate Senator Stewart for President on a silver platform free from Woman Suffrage, Prohibition, and attendant rot, and "The Silver Knights of America" will find their knighthood honorable and useful. The silver idea will win if it is not loaded down by short-haired women and long-haired men. It is to be hoped that it will have a chance.

Sonya Kovalevsky.1

SONYA KOVALEVSKY, the daughter of a Russian nobleman, was born in 1850 and died in 1891. During her short life she was, in turn,

1 Sonya Kovalevsky, - her recollections of childhood. Translated from the Russian by Isabel F. Hapgood. With a biography by Anna Carlctta Leffler, Duchess of Cajanello, translated from the Swedish by A. M. Clive Bailey; and a biographical note by Lily Wolffs: hn. New York: The Century Company. 1895.

the carefully guarded child of aristocratic parents, the "nihilistic wife" of a frowzy student, a student herself at the universities of Heidelberg and Berlin, a Doctor of Philosophy with honors in mathematics, a privat docent and finally a full professor of mathematics at the University of

Sonia Kovalevsky. 1. Memoir. By A. C. Leffler (Edgren), Duchessa Di Cajanello. II. Reminiscences of Childhood, written by Herself. Translated into English by Louise Von Cassel. New York: Macmillan & Company: 1895. For sale by Wm. Doxey. $1.25.

Stockholm. Moreover, she was the author of novels and of plays which, by themselves, would have given her a high rank; and finally, she was the heroine of dramas played out by her own passions in her own heart, and each of these dramas was in its way a master-work.

The book under review is a remarkable one in each of three respects and it is interesting in a hundred others. In the first place, it gives the most vivid picture possible of the interior of one of those Russian homes of the gentry which Turgeneff and Tolstoi have painted - but no better. And it gives the life-like image of the wave of aspiration, discontent, effort, which swept over young Russia in the years 1860-1870. The birth of the new woman of Russia is there recounted. In the second place, we have the history of the rise of a mathematical talent of a very high order. Sonya Kovalevsky's name will be ranked along with the few women mathematicians,- Maria Agnesi, etc. Her talent came by descent from one of her maternal grandfathers. and finally, her literary and dramatic successes were the record of a most remarkable life spent - and vainly spent-in la chasse au bonheur. Her happiness was wrecked on the rocks of a prodigious self-will.

With all these adventures and successes her life was a melancholy failure, and she knew it to be such. Even her scientific achievements were but the masterly working out of ideas derived from her teachers. It is difficult to conceive how she could have been more cruel and unregardful of her parents and of her child. Her intense passionate desire was for the two things which Balzac strove for all his laborious years to be famous, and to be loved. She attained both, as he did, to the uttermost. But her life ended, as it began, in wretchedness; while his was nobly satisfied. The man had cast out selfhood; the woman fastened the demon of self-will in her very vitals.

This melancholy book, by a woman of genius, about her own development, is a document of precious value in the new questions which arise today. There is nothing new in the solution, but the experiment was made on noble material, with many noble aspirations, and its utter failure is all the more signal for this reason.

An Unlessoned Girl.1

MISS TOMPKIN'S work has begun to be known to Californian readers by a number of pleasing

An Unlessoned Girl. By Elizabeth Knight Tompkins. New York: Geo. P. Putnam's Sons: 1895.

But

poems, published locally and in Eastern maga zines, and by certain clever skits, printed chiefly in the San Francisco Examiner. Her work is all of it bright, conscientious, and readable. even with so much of an introduction to the reading public it cannot but be considered flattering to so young a Californian, to have a leading publishing house like the Putnams bring out two of her books at nearly the same time.

A reading of An Unlessoned Girl, the book here to be noticed, justifies the judgment of the publishers, for the story will undoubtedly make a multitude of friends for itself. It is a girl's story of boarding school life in New York. The heroine is a girl in the "green apple" stage, unhappy in her home life because her strength of character and abundant energy are too cabined in the narrow bounds of a poor home in a small town. She meets with her opportunity by the act of a cousin, a wealthy young New Yorker, who re pays an obligation to her dead father by sending the girl to a good boarding school in New York City.

Of course there are many tribulations in this sudden transplanting, but Margy comes through them all and is successfully pruned and trained into shape for Vassar College, with the approval and love of the reader. Not that there are not some signs of inexperience in the book. It is a little vague as to places and devoid of local color, for the reason probably that the scene is laid in New York, rather than in San Francisco or San Leandro, the places that Miss Tompkins may be supposed to know best. The slangy tone of much of the conversation, too, it is to be hoped, would be more appropriate to the uncultured West than to New York.

But there is no question but that Miss Tompkins knows girls, their feelings, their aspirations, and their peculiarities. These she clearly brings out in her careful study of Margy, Louise, and their friends.

A New View of Invention.*

MR. W. H. SMYTH, manager of the late Mechanics' Fair, and a consulting mechanical engineer, has written an interesting brochure on Is the Inventive Faculty a Myth? His position is a novel one. He thinks that invention is simply the putting together of facts before known according to laws that are subject to study and classification, that there might, in short, be a "school of invention," in which "problems 2Is the Inventive Faculty a Myth? By W. H. Smyth. Reprinted from The Engineering Magazine. August, 185.

might be given, and each of the class expected to arrive at substantially the same solution.

46

In this view he traverses all the opinions of the doctors; for even the Supreme Court has held that it is the evidence of "the inventive faculty" that gives validity to a patent. Now to resolve "the inventive faculty" into the ordinary exercise of common sense,- with nothing of 'inspiration" about it, to make it a part of the mental equipment that has been irregular and spasmodic in its exhibition only because it has never been systematically cultivated in most people, is Mr. Smyth's attempt. He backs it up by the claim that he himself, "invents" to order in his ordinary business as a consulting mechanical engineer.

And yet we are not entirely convinced. To bring it into another field, wherein OVERLAND readers are supposed to be more at home,- Mr. Smyth's position is like that of one who should assert that there is no such thing as literary invention, that "genius" plays no part in the creation of masterpieces, — that it might be con ceived that a class could be formed and so trained in literary work that, given the same materials of old tradition that Shakspere had, each member of it could produce something quite similar to Hamlet or Macbeth.

Possibly so, unquestionably they could be so trained as to do something of value with the materials, and yet there has been but one Shakspere in the world, and he had but little training that we can discover. So there is but one Edison, though, no doubt, the electrical courses in our universities and technical schools will result in multitudes of minor inventions about electricity.

A New Edition of Poe.'

BY FAR the handsomest and most complete edition of the works of Edgar Allan Poe that has appeared has been brought out by the firm of Stone & Kimball of Chicago. It is newly collected and edited, with a memoir, critical introduction, and notes, by Edmund Clarence Stedman and George Edward Woodberry. The illustrations are by Albert Edward Sterner. It is in ten volumes. Little more can be said in commendation of the work than the bare mention of its editors and reference to its general excellence, as mere repetition adds nothing. It is printed on uncut parchment and bound in blue silk with design in gold. It is both an ornament and a necessity to every library.

'The Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Vol. I. Chicago: Stone & Kimball: 1894.

VOL. xxvi.—35.

eau.

The Mountains of California.

PROFESSOR JOHN MUIR has put in print the record of a lifetime of wanderings and observation in and about the mountains of California. As a naturalist and geologist the author ranks at the head, and as an observer of the things above the head and beneath the feet, he equals ThorIt is a wonderland that the reader invades, even the Californian who has spent his life among the mountains, as he listens to the author's stories of the Sierra, of glaciers, snow, passes, lakes, meadows, forests, storms, flowers, and inhabitants. It makes one long to go as Mr. Muir has into a great redwood forest or into the depths of a cañon and study and watch nature. Each tree has an individuality, each mountain slope a meaning, after one has looked upon them through Professor Muir's eyes. His studies of the Douglas squirrel, the water ouzel, wild sheep, and bees, are revelations. They make the reader wonder if he has been going through the world with his eyes shut.

The book should not only be in every school library in California, but it should be in every home within the entire range of the grand old Sierra Nevada. It is the most valuable work of its kind that has ever been penned by a Californian. It is handsomely bound and illustrated.

Memoirs of a Minister of France.3

From the Memoirs of a Minister of France is a collection of court tales of the time of Henry of Navarre, related by his Prime Minister, Duke de Sully, who as M. de Rosny the readers of Mr. Weyman's powerful novel, “A Gentleman of France," learned to admire for the very qualities which made him invaluable to his royal master. The adventures, gallantries, plots, and happenings, of Henry's court are related in a quiet, slow, quaint fashion that becomes both the age and dignity of the narrator. They relate principally to attempts on the King's life or honor, both growing out of the troublesome condition of the times and the jealousy of the Queen. While none of them are as exciting as certain passages in any of the author's former novels they contain an interest that is hard to explain. Possibly Mr. Weyman has striven more to make the stories appear truthful than exciting. If so

The Mountains of California. By John Muir. New York: The Century Company: 1894.

3 From the Memoirs of a Minister of France. By Stanley J. Weyman. New York: Longmans, Green, & Co.: 1895.