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Abstract

THIS is the first of four treatises on mechanics and experimental science, published to meet the requirements of candidates in the matriculation examination of London University. The volume before us contains a great number of numerical examples and exercises for students, and twenty pages are devoted to specimen examination papers of various kinds. The author's language is very inexact if compared with the language of Thomson and Tait's “Natural Philosophy,” or Dr. Lodge's text-book. It reads as if a shorthand-writer had taken notes of lectures, and the lecturer had published them after hasty correction. This inexactness is visible in almost every definition in the book. We read of velocities acting and accelerations working. New magnitudes are introduced; thus, “the intensity of a force is like the temperature of a body. It is measured by the velocity communicated, apart altogether from the mass to which it is communicated.” “But the quantity of a force is like the amount of heat in a body. Force-quantity is measured by the product of the velocity communicated and the mass to which it is communicated” (p. 103). In defining, if he can be said to define, “impressed force,” the author uses expressions such as “so that when we speak or read of an accelerating force, f or g, or 9·8 or 32·2, or a per second per second.”

Mechanics.

By Edward Aveling (London: Chapman and Hall, Limited, 1888).