Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, August 1899: Volume LVVarious
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, August 1899: Volume LV
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
Mr. _Robert P. Porter's_ volume on _Industrial Cuba_[62] deals with
living questions of the island. It aims to give a description of Cuba
as it appeared to the author when he visited it in the fall of 1898 as
special commissioner of the United States to report on its industrial,
commercial, and financial condition. It is the result of nearly seven
months' inquiry and hard work, in which the island was visited three
times, more than five hundred witnesses were examined, and "numerous
statements" were studied and analyzed. Among the special subjects
treated of are the political and economical condition of Cuba, the
outlook for labor, the population, sanitary work, Colonel Waring's
report, municipal problems in Havana, banks and currency, the revenue
and tariffs, commerce, sugar, tobacco, mines and mining, agriculture
and stock, timber and fruit, transportation, navigation, education and
religion, and the outlook for the future.
[Footnote 62: Industrial Cuba. Being a Study of Present
Commercial and Industrial Conditions, with Suggestions as to the
Opportunities presented in the Island for American Capital,
Enterprise, and Labor. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 428.
Price, $3.50.]
Naturalists and bibliophiles have reason to be grateful to Mr. _Call_
for his verbatim reproduction of Rafinesque's _Ichthyologia
Ohioensis_.[63] The book is of importance as constituting, in the
language of the editor, the foundation of fresh-water ichthyology in
America. No book dealing specifically with the Ohio Valley area as a
region has since been published. The original description of many fish
forms which are now recognized by ichthyologists as good species were
first given in this book, and many have not since been reprinted.
Further, the book contains the first and most complete description, to
date, of the Ohio River from Pittsburg down, with notices of all its
tributaries. Its value as a book about fishes is not limited to the
Ohio River, for the species of that stream are found, to a greater or
less extent, throughout the Mississippi Valley, so that it is in
effect a necessity to all students of the fresh-water fishes of that
territory. The editor regrets that Rafinesque did not preserve in some
manner the types of his genera, instead of which, when the technical
description was completed and some common form, if one was known, was
referred to, the specimen was discarded or rejected. Hence his
descriptions can not be compared conveniently with prepared specimens
in cabinets or with descriptions made from them, but the student must
go to the river and look up the living fish. The original papers of
Rafinesque on fishes were published in The Western Review and
Miscellaneous Magazine, Lexington, Ky., in 1819, 1820, and 1821. The
matter was then arranged in book form from the same type. Two
different systems of pagination resulted. These have both been
indicated in the present edition by the insertion of the numbers at
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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