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NEW BOOKS
to indulge, though irritating to anyone intent upon a single line of study, will reward the patient reader with many unexpected and varied additions to his knowledge. However much any devotee of certain canons of composition may find to criticize in these volumes, he is almost certain to end, as Sarton has done, in sheer admiration a t the magnitude of the achievement. Few scholars in any country have followed so wide an area of human thought through so long and difficult a period, thus enabling their readers to appraise the thousands of writers on science by the standard of a common judgment. In this country only Henry C. Lea has performed anything like a comparable feat; but even he did not succeed in reading so vast an amount of manuscript material. This reviewer was disappointed to find that, a t the end of the sixth volume, the author did not feel impelled to present his mature, retrospective reflections on the queries that must have been in his mind when he wrote his first essay on the subject. Perhaps, however, that was too much t o ask at a moment when he was still busily engaged in collecting his material and putting i t through the press. Possibly he is considering the similar examination of the modern period and therefore postponing his comprehensive conclusion. The modern period, however, is much more easily accessible and already fairly well known. I t would seem better-if a reviewer may be allowed to voice a personal preference-to devote his energies now to the formulation of those reflections which he is so well qualified to make. Some such ripened thought as that which evoked from Bury his famous Idea of Progress or from Breasted his D a w n of Conscience would form a fitting conclusion to the monumental achievement which these six volumes represent. To this request the reviewer would add the plea that, if and when the author does undertake such a work, he employ the humanistic style of his first essay rather than the quantitative, enumerative style of the concluding chapter of the present work. This suggestion is offered less as a criticism than as the espression of a hope, for such is the perversity of man that it is but natural for him to ask for more, when so much has already been given. A . C. KREY.
P. M .MORSE,L. J. Elliptic Cylinder and Spheroidal Wave Functions. By J. A . STRATTOS, 127 pp. Kea. York: John Wiley and Sons, CHC, A N D R. -4.HUTKER. €4x 11 in.; xii Inc., 1941. Price: $1.00. This volnme should be brought to the attention of theoretical physical chemists whose work involves boundary-value problems where the boundary is an elliptic cylinder or a spheroid; i t treats the solution of the wave equation in elliptic cylinder cdrdinates (Mathieu’s equation), and in prolate and oblate spheroidal co4rdinates. Cases which come t o the reviewer’s mind are the electrokinetic theory of spheroidal particles and the problem of hindered rotation about single bonds. The volume collects together the important mathematical properties of the functions involved, and presents tables of the necessary coefficients to find the numerical values of the functions, and the eigen values (separation constants). Being more familiar with the Mathieu functions, the reviewer compared the present tables with those of Ince (Proc. Roy. SOC.Edinburgh 62, 355 (1931-32)) and of Goldstein (Trans. Cambridge Phil. SOC.23, 303 (1927)), t o which no reference seemed given. The present tables include the nine hfathieu functions of lowest order (Ince gives twelve, Goldstein five); the range of the parameter c is not as great as in the other tables, but the tabular difference in c is quite small, and the present tables should be considerably more valuable than the others in the range of loiv c values. BRYCEL. CRAWFORD, JR.
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Diflusion in and through Solids. By R . M. BARRER. 5t s 82 in.; siii 464 pp.; 158 fig.; 119 tables. Cambridge: The University Press; New York: The MacMillan Company, 1941. Price: $6.50. This book is one of the Cambridge Series of Physical Chemistry Texts under the editorship of E. K . Rideal. The author, as the title indicates, has conceived the subject of dif-
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