_M. J. Costantin_ conceives that science consists in something more than the mere accumulation, description, and classification of facts, with which too many persons confound it, and that the important thing is what the facts teach, and, as related to it or as what may help to find it out, the theories that may be deduced from them. He applies this principle to the evolution of plant life in his book _Les Végétaux et les Milieux Cosmiques_ (Plants and Cosmic Media)--adaptative evolution, which is essentially a study of the operation of the various material factors of the environment on growth and development. "Guided by Goethe's ideas, he invites us to witness the incessant variations of organized existence everywhere visible in Nature," under the influence of cold and heat, light, gravity, and the aquatic medium, hoping in these studies to find new and decisive arguments in favor of transformist conceptions. He aims to show how the new characteristics produced by changes in the influence of these factors to which plants are subjected may be fixed and gradually become hereditary. (Published by Félix Alcan, Paris, in the _Bibliothèque Scientifique Internationale_.) * * * * * Mr. _A. G. Elliot's_ little work on _Industrial Electricity_--a translation and adaptation from the French of Henry D. Graffigny--is the first and introductory volume of an electro-mechanical series published by Whittaker & Co., London, and the Macmillan Company, New York. The editor, in introducing the volumes, expresses the belief that there is room for them because they explain in very clear and non-mathematical language the many and various applications of electricity. Many thousand copies of the original French editions have been sold. The present volume is divided into short chapters, each dealing with a separate branch of practical electricity-its nature, the units, magnetism and induction, practical measurement, chemical generators, accumulators, dynamo-electric machinery, electric light, electricity as a motive power, electric chemistry and electro-plating, bells and telephones, and telegraphs. In the succeeding volumes of the series the more important branches of the subjects touched upon here will be treated separately and in detail. * * * * *