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MORE problems !¹ Why should we read them if they are not our problems, but only Mr. Lewes’s ? Of all forms of earthly worry, the metaphysical worry seems the most gratuitous. If it lands us in permanently skeptical conclusions, it is worse than superfluous ; and if (as is almost always the case with non-skeptical systems) it simply ends by “ indorsing ” common-sense, and reinstating us in the possession of our old feelings, motives, and duties, we may fairly ask if it was worth while to go so far round in order simply to return to our startingpoint and be put back into the old harness. Is not the primal state of philosophic innocence, since the practical difference is nil, as good as the state of reflective enlightenment ? And need we, provided we can stay at home and take the world for granted, undergo the fatigues of a campaign with such uncomfortable spirits as the present author, merely for the sake of coming to our own again, with nothing gained but the pride of having accompanied his expedition ? So we may ask. But is the pride nothing? Consciousness is the only measure of utility, and even if no philosophy could ever alter a man’s motives in life,— which is untrue,—that it should add to their conscious completeness is enough to make thousands take upon themselves its burden of perplexities. We like the sense of companionship with better and more eager intelligences than our own, and that increment of self-respect which we all experience in passing from an instinctive to a reflective state, and adopting a belief which hitherto we simply underwent.

Mr. Lewes has drunk deep of the waters of skepticism that have of late years been poured out so freely in England, but he has worked his way through them into a constructive activity; and his work is only one of many harbingers of a reflux in the philosophic tide. All philosophic reflection is essentially skeptical at the start. To common-sense, and in fact to all living thought, matters actually thought of are held to be absolutely and objectively as we think them. Every representation per se, and while it persists, is of something absolutely so. It becomes relative, flickering, insecure, only when reduced, only in the light of further consideration which we may bring forward to confront it with. This may be called its reductive. Now the reductive of most of our confident beliefs about Being is the reflection that they are our beliefs; that we are turbid media; and that a form of being may exist uncontaminated by the touch of the fallacious knowing subject. In the light of this conception, the Being we know droops its head; but until this conception has been formed it knows no fear. The motive of most philosophies has been to find a position from which one could exorcise the reductive, and remain securely in possession of a secure belief. Ontologies do this by their conception of “ necessary ” truth, i. e., a truth with no alternative; with a prœterea nihil, and not a plus ultra possibile; a truth, in other words, whose only reductive would be the impossible, nonentity, or zero.

In such conclusions as these philosophy re-joins hands with common-sense. For above all things common-sense craves for a stable conception of things. We desire to know what to expect. Once having settled down into an attitude towards life both as to its details and as a whole, an incalculable disturbance which might arise, disconcert all our judgments, and render our efforts vain, would be in the last degree undesirable. Now as a matter of fact we do live in a world from which as a rule we know what to expect. Whatever items we found together in the past are likely to coexist in the future. Our confidence in this state of things deprives us of all sense of insecurity; if we lay our plans rightly the world will fulfill its part of the contract. Commonsense, or popular philosophy, explains this by what is called the judgment of Substance, that is, by the postulation of a persistent Nature, immutable by time, behind each phenomenal group, which binds that group together and makes it what it is essentially and eternally. Even in regard to that mass of accidents which must be expected to occur in some shape but cannot be accurately prophesied in detail, we set our minds at rest, by saying that the world with all its events has a substantial cause; and when we call this cause God, Love, or Perfection, we feel secure that whatever the future may harbor, it cannot at bottom be inconsistent with the character of this term. So our attitude towards even the unexpected is in a general sense defined.

Now this substantial judgment has been adopted by most dogmatic philosophies. They have explained the collocations of phenomena by an immutable underlying nature or natures, beside or beyond which they have posited either the sphere of the Impossible, if they professed rationalism throughout, or merely a de facto Nonentity if they admitted the element of Faith as legitimate. But the skeptical philosophers who have of late predominated in England have denied that the substantial judgment is legitimate at all, and in so doing have seemed among other things to deny the legitimacy of the confidence and repose which it engenders. The habitual concurrence of the same phenomena is not a case of dynamic connection at all, they say. It may happen again — but we have no rational warrant for asserting that it must. The syntheses of data we think necessary are only so to us, from habit. The universe may turn inside out to-morrow, for aught we know ; our knowledge grasps neither the essential nor the immutable. Instead of a nonentity beyond, there is a darkness, peopled it may be with every nightmare shape. Their total divergence from popular philosophy has many other aspects, but this last thought is their reductive of its tendency to theosophize and of its dogmatic confidence in general.

The originality of Mr. Lewes is that while vigorously hissing the “Substances” of common-sense and metaphysics off the stage, he also scouts the reductive which the school of Mill has used, and maintains the absoluteness and essentiality of our knowledge. The world according to him as according to them is truly enough only the world as known, but for us there is no other world. For grant a moment the existence of such a one : we could never be affected by it; as soon as we were affected, however, we should be knowers of it, in the only sense in which there is any knowledge at all, the sense of subjective determination, — and it would have become our world. Now, as such it is a universe and not a heap of sand, or, as has been said, a nulliverse like Mill’s. Its truths are œternœ veritates, essential, exhaustive, immutable. We can settle down upon them and they will keep their promise. The sum of all the properties is the substance ; the predicates are the subject; each property is the other viewed in a “ different aspect.”The same collocations must therefore occur in the future. So far from the notion of cause being illusory, the cause is the effect “ in another relation,”and the effect the procession of the cause. The identification by continuity of what the senses discriminate, and so, according to the reigning empiricism, disunite, is carried so far by Mr. Lewes that in his final chapter he affirms the psychic event which accompanies a tremor in the brain to be that tremor “ in a different aspect.”

His arguments we have not space to expose. One thing is obvious, however : that his results will meet with even greater disfavor from the empirics than from the ontologists in philosophy, and that the pupils of Mill and Bain in particular will find this bold identification of the sensibly diverse too mystical to pass muster. It is in fact the revival of the old Greek puzzle of the One and the Many — how each becomes the other — which they, if we apprehend them aright, have escaped by the simple expedient of suppressing the One. They will join hands too with the ontologists in conjuring up beyond the universe recognized by Mr. Lewes the spectre of an hypothetical possible Something, not a Zero —only the ontologists will not join them again in letting this fill the blank form of a logical reductive pure and simple, but will dub it the universe in se, or the universe as related to God, if Mr. Lewes still insists on their defining everything as in relation. That Mr. Lewes should say candidly of this thought that he is willing to ignore it, cannot restrain them. We may conclude, therefore, that ever-sprouting reflection, or skepticism, just as it preys on all other systems, may also in strict theoretic legitimacy prey upon the ultimate data of Mr. Lewes’s Positivism taken as a whole ; even though all men should end by admitting that within the bounds of that empirical whole, his views of the necessary continuity between the parts were true. To this reduction by a plus ultra, Mr. Lewes can only retort by saying, “ Foolishness ! So much ontologic thirst is a morbid appetite.”But in doing this he simply falls back on the act of faith of all positivisms. Weary of the infinitely receding chase after a theoretically warranted Absolute, they return to their starting-point and break off there, like practical men, saying, “Physics, we espouse thee; for better or worse be thou our Absolute ! ”

Skepticism, or unrest, in short, can always have the last word. After every definition of an object, reflection may arise, infect it with the cogito, and so discriminate it from the object in se, This is possible ad infinitum. That we do not all do it is because at a certain point most of us get tired of the play, resolve to stop, and assuming something for true, pass on to a life of action based on that.

We wish that Mr. Lewes had emphasized this volitional moment in his Positivism. Although the consistent pyrrhonist is the only theoretically unassailable man, it does not follow that he is the right man. Between us and the universe, there are no “ rules of the game.” The important thing is that our judgments should be right, not that they should observe a logical etiquette. There is a brute, blind element in every thought which still has the vital heat within it and has not yet been reflected on. Our present thought always has it, we cannot escape it, and we for our part think philosophers had best acknowledge it, and avowedly posit their universe, staking their persons, so to speak, on the truth of their position. In practical life we despise a man who will risk nothing, even more than one who will heed nothing. May it not be that in the theoretic life the man whose scruples about flawless accuracy of demonstration keep him forever shivering on the brink of Belief is as great an imbecile as the man at the opposite pole, who simply consults his prophetic soul for the answer to everything? What is this but saying that our opinions about the nature of things belong to our moral life ?

Mr. Lewes’s personal fame will now stand or fall by the credo he has published. We do not think the fame should suffer, even though we reserve our assent to important parts of the creed. The book is full of vigor of thought and felicity of style, in spite of its diffuseness and repetition. It will refute many of the objections made by critics to the first volume; and will, we doubt not, be a most important ferment in the philosophic thought of the immediate future.

-In Mr. Boyesen’s new novel,² as in the case of his Gunnar, we have first of all to greet a substantial success — and success with characters and scenery that will speak, of their nature, to a wider audience than his initial romance, popular as it is, addressed. But this done, there are some exceptions to be taken. The plot is as simple as possible ; this, of course, we do not object to; but it is sometimes a good principle of art to graft upon the plain, sturdy stock of the primary motive a variety of situations, of counter motives and emotions, that strengthen as well as beautify the different parts. The Norseman’s Pilgrimage is not wanting in change of physical and scenic situation, but the mental and spiritual pose and grouping are about the same all the way through. After the opening startle and adventure of the first chapter, and the encounter at the Venusberg, Varberg and Ruth Copley assume at once the relative position which is maintained by them up to the final pages ; and the change from Leipsic to Strasburg, and from there to Norway, with all the splendor and pleasure of association that it involves, is really to a certain slight extent factitious in its interest. Besides this, we do not quite like the portrait of Ruth. No doubt the author has drawn with care from nature; but Ruth stands here, by a more or less strong implication, as a type of the best American girls, without any other figure to modify the effect produced by her. Though we recognize in her traits that are characteristic of many American young women, they are combined with certain elements of character — a dignity, a grave sweetness — that we think is not apt to coexist with them.

Especially we should say she lacks the accent of Boston girlhood, though it is that city that she hails from. We must not, however, neglect to mention the many skillful touches of character, both in her portrait and in those of others. Mrs. Elder is excellent. Too much cannot be said in praise of the way in which Thora is rendered, — that delicate, dreamy snow-maiden of the north who seems like the ghost of Varberg’s haunting love for his motherland, and bears her disappointment with such sweet, pathetic silence. The whole description of the Norwegian homestead and the old grandparents is charming. Mr. Boyesen is as yet more harmonious in his pictures of Norway than in others ; but his advances in the presentation of other things is decided and commendable; and with his remarkable command of English and rapidly developing style, therefore, we are prepared to see him introduce into our fictitious literature elements of the liveliest interest and vigor, unused before.

— The inverted title of Mr. Calvert’s collected essays ³ indicates their greatest fault: a certain pomposity of manner, a something which looks like verbal affectation. He has a remarkable affluence of words, which he is apt to dispose rather showily and fantastically, so that his style sometimes reminds us of the dress of those people who are a trifle too fond, for perfect taste, of making picturesque points in costume. Frequently Mr. Calvert’s verbal magnificence is appropriate and striking, like that of Sainte-Beuve himself, for whom the American essayist has so healthful and honorable an enthusiasm. But then again he will disport himself in such expressions as “ posited,” “ teemful,” “ transpicuous; ” or strain after an aphorism with an effect of blank absurdity, as in the remark, “ That no writer of limited faculties can have a style of high excellence ought to be a truism ; ” or airily cast off the ordinary bonds of English grammar, as where he says of Carlyle’s Cromwell and Frederick, “ Such giants, carrying nations on their broad fronts, Mr. Carlyle in writing their lives with duteous particularity has embraced the full story of the epoch in which each was a leader.” These eccentricities are the more remarkable because Mr. Calvert in the essay entitled Errata proclaims himself exceedingly sensitive in the matter of “English undefiled,” and is certainly hypercritical in his censure of the use of “ another ” for “ other ” in the expression “ on one ground or another.” “ Now,” he says, “ another, the prefix an making it singular, embraces but one ground or cause, and therefore, contrary to the purpose of the writer, the words mean that there are but two grounds or causes.” This seems to us nonsense. The prefix an is the indefinite article. Derivatively, of course, it means one : unus, ein ; but practically it means one of a class, in this case and in many others any one, not one to the exclusion of the rest. However, other is shorter than another, and so, if for no other reason, it is usually better. And it would be invidious to emphasize too strongly the trifling blemishes on Mr. Calvert’s work, since his little volume contains so much of refined literary insight, delicate criticism, and writing which is truly and justifiably fine. The essay on Dante and his Recent Translators not only glows with enthusiasm for the great Florentine, but shows the nicest possible discrimination of the merits of his translators, and is full of valuable suggestion for poetical translators generally. Mr. Calvert’s analysis of the terza rima is so fascinating, and his defense of it so eloquent, that we could wish he had adopted it in his own highly concentrated octosyllabic versions.

The very interesting and valuable paper entitled Sainte-Beuve the Critic reflects much of the great master’s own spirit and method, and we cannot wonder that he himself was made happy by it. We are particularly grateful to Mr. Calvert for his generosity in appending to his essay the lovely and characteristic letter in which in the last year of his life M. Sainte-Beuve thanked him for his appreciation. “It is always amazing to me,” wrote the gracious Frenchman, “ and in the present case more so than ever, to see how a friendly reader and a nice judge can contrive to construct a simple and consistent figure out of what looks to me in the retrospect like the course of a long river which goes meandering along with little care for declivities, and is perpetually deserting its banks. Portraits like that which you offer me give me a restingplace, and could almost make me believe in myself.” Extraordinary as these words sound on the lips of the prince of critics, those who have studied M. Sainte - Beuve most deeply best know how sincerely they were said. He who can become so absorbed in discerning the excellences of others that a chance glimpse of his own affords him pleasant surprise is no egotist at heart, whatever he may transiently appear, and to this nobler class of critics Mr. Calvert himself belongs. Carlyle, of whom his next essay treats, is always absorbed in the vices and meannesses of men. He is the precise antipodes of Sainte-Beuve as a critic, and the juxtaposition of these, two of the most important and carefully studied papers in Mr. Calvert’s book, seems to us peculiarly happy.

— There are moods when everything presents itself to the mind with something of that sheen which comes of nearly closing the eyes, on a sunny day, and letting the light shred itself into fine silken strands. It appears to us that Mr. Harrison ⁴ chooses for his writing only such intellectual moments as correspond to this description, and the delicate-colored rays which he amuses himself with are fine-spun literary associations, or dreamy reminiscences of towns and places famous in history. We employ the term chooses advisedly; for the glimpse we get in this volume of the author’s resources leads us to believe that he might employ his forces in other ways, but that he has selected this as the most fitting. Of course, every one has a right to decide whether he will wait, before putting pen to paper, until he finds himself entirely disposed to treat everything in a flowery manner, and to give utterance to only the rosiest and roundest of phrases; but in making the decision, he should not forget that this course will inevitably lead to a certain amount of monotony in his productions and of satiety in his reader. Mr. Harrison has not escaped that consequence. The essays in this collection all strike nearly the same notes; there are far too many classical allusions, and some of them are repeated, Hybla and Hymettus coming in, in several different papers, at about the same angle of incidence. “ The shadow of the lemon and the ilex rolled into the purpled glooms where lovers are fain to walk, or sculptors to muse, or painters to loiter and watch the delicate susceptibilities of chiarooscuro on an Italian noonday,” applied to the darkness overlaying Boccaccio’s biography, is a mild instance of the ornate language of the writer, in which, nevertheless, a good deal of his conventional freedom of appropriate allusion is discoverable. Elsewhere he dips into drastic frankness, speaking of the Catacombs that “ riot and run like estuaries of hell through leagues of moldering bones .... foul with gases and oozing at every pore with the ichor of centuries ; ” and at times he undertakes the grim and dexterous humor of Carlyle ; but the grand trouble in each of these cases is that all is done for the sake of the doing and not in the service of any large, distinct, or connected thought. The conclusions Mr. Harrison arrives at are sometimes well enough, sometimes not; but they are too obvious, and the expression of them is too much flustered with fine writing. We have the form and aspect of substantial criticism, without its legitimate structure. It is boned criticism, as we may say ; and as such we accept it — a delicacy, not a staple of diet. Sometimes, too, he is quite out of his key, and then everything falls flat. The paper on Lord Byron’s Italian Haunts is vulgar and distressing. A great breadth of expression is here and sometimes elsewhere imprudently borrowed from the armory of powerful writers who have known how to control its movements to a hair’s-breadth. One cannot be severe toward Mr. Harrison, however, for it is evident that he has read much, and that he desires to be thoroughly literary. His book comes from the South, whence it is pleasant to get anything that speaks of an advance which we feel sure the future ought to see in that quarter; but there is really nothing in his style that has local meaning, except its over-ornateness. We should have been glad to find, had it been by the subtlest fibre in his thought, that Mr. Harrison is possessed by his nationality ; but it does not appear. Still, one may read his book with a great deal of pleasure, if only for the ground it revisits with its anecdotes and its musings about Heine, Tasso, Béranger, Jasmin the Troubadour, Hawthorne, and much besides. The author’s careful culture of phrases leads sometimes to the happiest hits, as when he calls Goethe “ the great ice-artist.” “ There is something in the air of Italy,” he says “that embalms and perpetuates. . . . This air of the herbarium ” is present “ in all that relates to early Italian literary history.” The best of the chapters are those on Heine, Chénier and Baudelaire having in them more of direct treatment; that on Bellman, the Swedish improvisatore, is a passionate eulogy which can appeal only to those who are acquainted with the poet whose memory incites it.

— Dr. Coues’s new work on the Birds of the Northwest⁵ is one that will not only prove attractive to the general reader, but will be indispensable to the working ornithologist, so satisfactorily has Dr. Coues performed the task he so earnestly set himself to do. The work is marked throughout by a thoroughness that only natural aptitude, patient industry, and a long familiarity with the subject could give. It is, in short, the work of a master, and one which will add to the reputation of the already distinguished author. The volume forms the third of the miscellaneous publications of the United States Geological Survey of the Territories, in charge of Dr. F. V. Hayden. The work, as we learn from the Introduction, is based in great part on the material collected in former years by Dr. Hayden himself, together with that more recently collected under his direction in connection with the work of the United States Geological Survey of the Territories. Naturalists have long been indebted to Dr. Hayden for his extended and conscientious field-work, and they are now—especially ornithologists — placed under renewed obligations by the publication, by his authorization, of this elaborate report upon his ornithological collections.

The region embraced in this work is the so-called Missouri region, in its broadest sense, the whole watershed of that great river and its tributaries being the scene of the chief part of Dr. Hayden’s ornithological field-work. While the work refers mainly to the so-called middle faunal province of the continent, it also overlaps the boundaries of both the eastern and western provinces, thus including not only most of the birds of the Atlantic States, but a large proportion of those of the Rocky Mountains. As the birds of the Missouri region, in common with those of North America generally, had already been repeatedly and sufficiently described, the author very properly deemed it needless to increase the text by including full technical descriptions, and in this respect has contented himself with adding descriptions of states of plumage not before properly recorded. The geographical distribution of the species, however, has received the attention its special importance deserves, the range of all the species and varieties being traced throughout their respective habitats with greater detail than in any hitherto published work. The elaboration of these points necessarily involved a thorough examination of the literature of American ornithology. That subsequent investigators might be saved much of the drudgery this necessary work entailed, Dr. Coues has published in the present work the most extended lists of bibliographical references yet presented in any work treating of North American birds. Besides giving the synonymy in full, he has cited all the important references to each species, in many cases indicating the character of the notices cited by such remarks as “ critical,” “ anatomical,” etc., and, in case of faunal lists, stating the locality specified and whether the species is common or rare. These elaborate reference lists “ not only serve,” as the author truly says, “ as a guide to research, and as vouchers for facts of geographical distribution, but they also have a direct bearing upon the important matter of nomenclature, fixity and precision of which are nowhere more desirable than in the natural sciences, where names become in a great measure the exponents of biological generalizations. ”

The biographical matter is freshly prepared, and the greater part of it has never before been published. In his Introduction Dr. Coues acknowledges special favors in the way of original observations communicated to him in MS. from Mr. T. M. Trippe, Mr. J. A. Allen, Mr. J. Stevenson, Dr. J. M. Wheaton, and others, and he draws liberally upon the recently published local lists of the birds of different portions of the West for facts that have not before found their way into a general treatise. It thus happens that his biographical notices are very unequal in length, rarely exceeding a few lines for the well-known Eastern species, while for some of the less-known Western forms they range from one or two pages in length to ten pages. These sketches are the first detailed biographical accounts we have had of some of the birds of the far West. His long sojourn in different parts of the West and his explorations along the northern boundary-line have given him abundant opportunity to become personally familiar with the Western species, and his notes bear the impress of his actual contact with the species in their natural haunts. The following is a paragraph from his account of the long-crested jay of the Rocky Mountains (Cyanurus Stelleri var. macrolophus):

“All jays make their share of noise in the world ; they fret and scold about trifles, quarrel over anything, and keep everything in a ferment when they are about. The particular kind we are now talking about is nowise behind his fellows in these respects — a stranger to modesty and forbearance, and the many gentle qualities that charm us in some little birds and endear them to us ; he is a regular filibuster, ready for any sort of adventure that promises sport or spoil, even if spiced with danger. Sometimes he prowls about alone, but oftener has a band of choice spirits with him, who keep each other in countenance (for our jay is a coward at heart, like other bullies) and share the plunder on the usual terms in such cases, of each one taking all he can get. Once I had a chance of seeing a band of these guerrillas on a raid; they went at it in good style, but came off very badly indeed. A vagabond troop made a descent upon a bush-clump, where, probably, they expected to find eggs to suck, or at any rate a chance for mischief and amusement. To their intense joy, they surprised a little owl quietly digesting his grasshoppers with both eyes shut. Here was a lark, and a chance to wipe out a part of the score that the jays keep against owls for injuries received time out of mind. In the tumult that ensued, the little birds scurried off, the woodpeckers overhead stopped tapping to look on, and a snake that was basking in a sunny spot concluded to crawl into his hole. The jays lunged furiously at their enemy, who sat helpless, bewildered by the sudden onslaught, trying to look as big as possible, with his wings set for bucklers and his bill snapping; meanwhile twisting his head till I thought he would wring it off, trying to look all ways at once. The jays, emboldened by partial success, grew more impudent, till their victim made a break through their ranks and flapped into the heart of a neighboring juniper, hoping to be protected by the tough, thick foliage. The jays went trooping after, and I hardly know how the fight would have ended had I not thought it time to take a hand in the game myself. I secured the owl first, it being the interesting pygmy owl (Glaucidium), and then shot four of the jays before they made up their minds to be off. The collector has no better chance to enrich his cabinet than when the birds are quarreling; and so it has been with the third party in a difficulty ever since the monkey divided the cheese for the two cats.”

His whole account of the sparrow-hawk is worthy of transcription, as is that of the burrowing owl, the latter from the special interest attaching to the subject of the sketch; but lack of space forbids. He devotes a page to the myth of the supposed harmonious relations of the owls, prairiedogs, and rattlesnakes, which he thus holds up to ridicule : —

“ According to the dense bathos of such nursery tales, in this underground Elysium the snakes give their rattles to the puppies to play with, the old dogs cuddle the owlets, and farm out their own litters to the grave and careful birds; when an owl and dog come home paw-in-wing, they are often mistaken by their respective progeny, the little dogs nosing the owls in search of the maternal font, and the old dogs left to wonder why the baby owls will not nurse. It is a pity to spoil a good story for the sake of a few facts,” he adds, and then proceeds to give the facts.

Under the head of the white-headed eagle he takes occasion to say what all ornithologists concur in, and this may be well repeated, since supposed specimens of Audubon’s mythical “ bird of Washington” are recurring with, to the ornithologist, nauseating frequency, solely from the lack of a knowledge of just these facts. “ From the circumstance that several years (at least three) are required for the gaining of the perfect plumage, when the head and tail are entirely white, it follows that ‘ gray eagles ’ and 1 birds of Washington ‘ are much the more frequently met with. Those who, unpracticed in ornithology, may be puzzled by accounts of numerous eagles, may be interested to know that only two species have ever been found in the United States. In any plumage they may be instantly distinguished by the legs — feathered to the toes in Aquila chrysaëtus [golden eagle], naked on the whole shank in Haliaëtus leucocephalus [white-headed eagle].”

The members of the grouse family come in for a large share of attention, very full biographies being given of nearly all the Western species. The sharp-tailed grouse, for instance, comes in for ten pages; the sage cock, or cock-of-the-plains, for six; and the white-tailed ptarmigan, the plumed and the Massena quails for about equally extended notices.

As previously stated, the book includes the greater part of the species of North American land-birds. All the gallinæ, or the grouse and their allies, are included, while complete monographs are given of the Laridœ (gulls, terns, etc.), Colymbidœ (loons), and the Podicipidœ (grebes). The raptorial birds of the continent also nearly all find a place, though sometimes only the synonomy and bibliographical references are given of the extra-limital species, and these are added in foot-notes. For this the working ornithologist will be grateful, adding, as it does, greatly to the scientific value and usefulness of the book. Many points in the work of a more technical character might well be noticed, showing the advanced ground held by the author on the leading biological questions of the day, but the present notice already exceeds its intended limits. A few minor defects might also be pointed out, but they are generally of too little importance to require special mention. Of the typography of the work, it is probably sufficient to say that it is from the Government Printing Office and is uniform in style with the usual department reports. While there is little æsthetically to redeem it, the work is exceptionally free from typographical errors. An exhaustive index of fifty-three pages closes the volume, which contains upwards of eight hundred closely - printed pages, and forms a monument to the patience and industry of the author that any one might well be proud of.

— A more unattractive book of travels than the Rev. Mr. Haven’s Our Next-Door Neighbor: A Winter in Mexico,⁶ it would be hard to find. The author had the advantage of going through a land which lies almost entirely out of the range of the ordinary tourist’s journeys, and with regard to which definite information would have been agreeable and useful; but instead of writing a book that should tell us about the country he saw, and the people he met, he has filled nearly five hundred octavo pages with poor jokes, denunciation of the Roman Catholic church, a very confused account of his adventures, and a very thorough exhibition of his own prejudices. A few extracts will, perhaps, illustrate these remarks. At Progreso, in Yucatan, he met a Spaniard and his wife, a Cuban, with their three adopted daughters, one a white girl, another with African blood in her veins, the third an Indian. Of this singularly formed family he writes as follows : “ Our ignorance of Spanish put a barrier between us, but their bearing was sisterly and filial; and we accepted this index of the New America as a token of the superiority of Yucatan over the United States, and a proof of the fitness of the name of the town. Had many an American father recognized, not his adopted, but his actual family, a like variety would have been visible about the paternal board. It will yet be, and without sin or shame, as in this cultivated circle.” Such is Mr. Haven’s notion of progress.

Only one of his remarks about religion need be quoted. He is describing Sunday in Vera Cruz. “ The shops are open, the workmen busy. The church is attended once, as in the mummeries this morning. Then the circus came running down the street, the clown and two pretty boys ahead, preparatory to performing outside the walls. It was the first band of music I had heard on Sunday since that which awoke me in Detroit last summer. How sad and striking the resemblance ! Shall our German infidelity and mis-education make our land like Mexico? Or shall a holy faith and a holy life make this land like the New England of our fathers ? As Mr. Lincoln said, ' Our nation must be all slave or all free; ’ and as one infinitely greater said, ‘ A house divided against itself cannot stand ; ’ so America, North and South, the United States and Mexico, must be all Christian in its Sabbath sanctity, or all diabolic.”

It would be only too easy to make further excerpts illustrative of the author’s generous temper and profound wisdom, but we forbear. A book more defective in every thing demanded by what is called good taste, it would be hard to find ; it is a lamentable monument of bigotry and narrowmindedness. Still it should be borne in mind that the volume is probably made up from letters hastily written for publication in a journal which had readers not averse to the tendencies the author shows. But in publishing them in book form and offering them to a larger public, the author does a very bold thing, which cannot be too severely condemned.

— The design of Mr. Jones’s volume on Africa⁷ is worthy of praise, and if it is not completely carried into execution, enough has been done to make the book not only interesting — it could not fail to be that — but also serviceable. Within a few years African literature has grown enormously, and those who have read the rapidly succeeding accounts of what has been done by different explorers have found it hard to bear in their minds exactly what had been done by their predecessors, and all the shifting details of African geography. For such this volume will be found a useful condensation. The first chapter contains some general information with regard to the different divisions of the continent, of the various races inhabitating it, and of the animals and vegetation to be found there. The accounts of earlier African travelers are very brief ; the bulk of the book is devoted to synopses from the reports of Livingstone, Barth, Overwig, Richardson, Schweinfurth, Du Chaillu, Baker, Burton, Speke and Grant, Magyar, Serval, and Anderson. It must be noticed that it is not a complete list of the explorers of that country, but so far as the book goes it presents in an intelligible form the results these explorers have obtained. This will be found a valuable volume, and it may well be recommended to those who supply books for school and town libraries. Parents, too, who have sons interested in books of travel, cannot do better than place it in their hands.

FRENCH AND GERMAN.<FNREF>1</FNREF>

The first volume of M. d’Ideville’s Journal d’un Diplomate ⁸ was noticed in these pages about two years ago, and attention was called to its value and interest. This third volume contains his notes taken in Dresden and Athens in the years 1867 and 1868, and will be found no less entertaining reading. For some unexplained reason the account of the stay in Greece, although it comes first in time, follows in the book that of the residence in Dresden ; probably the author thought information about Germany would find more readers nowadays in France than would that concerning any other country, but still, since a very large number of Americans are familiar with Dresden and but few with Greece, most of us will turn first to what is said of this unhappy monarchy. M. d’Ideville found it a lamentably dull country to live in. We hear less about brigands, to be sure, than we do in the journals and conversations of those bold tourists who wait over a steamer and detect a brigand in every peasant; indeed, the French minister found dullness his greatest foe, and hardly mentions the bandits. The peculiarities of the people he naturally speedily detected; a certain indifference to exactitude occasionally struck him, and he states that it is the habit of young Greeks to enter the service of the English and French residents, in order to acquire those languages against the day when they shall enter diplomatic life, and be appointed ambassadors abroad or ministers at home. His authority for this statement was his landlord, who had himself had an experience very much of this sort. Indeed, the Greek mind has shown itself to be not yet wholly exhausted, by devising the ingenious improvement of giving a pension to all who have ever held a position under government, and since almost every inhabitant of the city has received a fair education at home or a liberal one abroad, and there is actually no business done in the whole country, the government purse has to maintain all the citizens. The Greeks are certainly not deficient in skill and energy; their success in other countries shows this ; but at home they probably find it easier to have a change of ministry and to try their luck that way, than to be the first in the country to introduce great changes in the way of commerce or manufactures.

It will be remembered that M. d’Ideville was in Italy during the years in which that country was regaining its independence; the period described in this volume was one less troublous and important. He was in Greece at the time of the Cretan “ revolution,” as all rebellions are now called in the newspapers, and he was an eye-witness of the following curious incident: The Turks brought back to the Piræus about four hundred Cretan volunteers, whom they had captured and did not care to treat as prisoners-of-war; they were willing to let them land with all of their arms, equipments, etc., when suddenly those brave Greeks who had stayed at home, and, apparently, read ancient history, refused to receive again those who failed of success in the war. The civilians, indeed, went so far as to push the returning soldiers into the water, so that one, at least, was drowned, and it was only after the use of both force and diplomacy that peace was restored.

Of Saxony the author has a different story to tell. He seems to have found Dresden as strange as Greece, though in a different way. He throws no light on German politics other than that possessed by all who have not completely forgotten the events of the last few years. Bismarck figures continually in the background, and generally as a thing of evil. Being ignorant of the German language, M. d’Ideville was compelled to fill his diary with very meagre and scrappy notes about matters which were sure to catch the eye of an outsider sooner than that of one familiar with the country. The Circus Renz, gossip about Prussian sentinels, Bismarck’s plans of conquering the whole of Europe, and similar trifles take the place which might better have been devoted to more serious matters. It is no wonder that France was ignorant of the condition of Germany at the beginning of the last war, for M. d’Ideville’s amount of information may probably be taken as a fair sample of the condition of most of the French embassies in Germany at that time, and he was confident, apparently, that Saxony and Prussia would be on different sides in case of a foreign war. M. d’Ideville’s book is of service, however, if for no other purpose than that of showing what France demanded of its representatives in foreign parts. M. d’Ideville is very little of a Machiavelli, but his harmless gossip is often entertaining.

— A brief biography of Madame de Girardin⁹ is principally remarkable for tlie very scanty information it gives about that lady, and interesting almost entirely by means of the letters addressed to her by different correspondents who are well known to fame. Such are Lamartine, Chateaubriand, and Rachel, whose letters are the most interesting of the volume. Madame de Girardin, whose maiden name was Delphine Gay, first became known in the salon of Madame Récamier, where she received many compliments from Chateaubriand, and others of the brilliant people who assembled there. Chateaubriand’s letters are very courtly; Lamartine’s, which are more numerous, are very characteristic of the man, with their smooth-tongued eloquence, their complacent mention of his success and popularity, and the numerous complaints at his misfortunes. The most attractive, on the whole, are those of Rachel, who seems to have been a warm friend of Madame de Girardin. This little volume contains a brief sketch of Rachel’s life, as it was told the author by the great actress’s sister. Their father, M. Félix, was the son of a poor laborer; he married the daughter of a tradesman of Mühlhausen, against the consent of her family, which had once been wealthy, and supported her and their sixteen children by selling handkerchiefs, needles, etc., at fairs. He was from Alsace, and knew almost no French; “he spoke only German, but,” the biographer tells us, “ he was intelligent; he sang with a pleasant tenor voice, and he was passionately fond of Schiller, and knew by heart the finest passages of his poems.”

Naturally his large family was not luxuriously cared for, and it was at the age of four that Rachel and her sister joined some little Italian children in their public performances in the street, and brought home their meagre collections to their father, who was too proud to accept them. Before long, however, this became a common method of increasing the family wealth. A singing-teacher heard them once in the street, and took them gratuitously into his class, and after his death, in 1833, they entered the conservatory. They made their first appearance together in opera. In 1837 Rachel appeared at the Gymnase, and in the next year at the Français. Madame de Girardin, in her husband’s paper, the Presse, was one of the first to praise her. Garcia, be it said by the way, made her first appearance at the same time. Of Rachel’s subsequent career there is no need of writing here. She retained her affection for Madame de Girardin, who, it will be remembered, wrote for the great actress some plays which still hold the stage ; perhaps as well known as any of these is Lady Tartuffe.

As has been said, the biographical part of this volume is not very satisfactory, but such as is given is tolerably entertaining. Delphine Gay was one of the brilliant women of a brilliant period : her mother knew every one, so that she at an early age made useful and agreeable acquaintances; she was very beautiful; indeed, she wrote a poem on the joy of being handsome. At first she naturally fell into some of the faults of the period, and from Lamartine she learned a mournful tone, but for a good part she maintained her originality. One of the singular things of Emile de Girardin’s life was his marrying this celebrated woman. He was the illegitimate son of General de Girardin, and in defiance of law and custom had taken his father’s name when, after some difficulty, he had learned it. He had known already curious adventures, and his marriage did not take place without difficulty, inasmuch as he was unable to produce a register of his birth. Several witnesses, however, averred that they had known him in 1822 or 1823, and that he appeared at that time about eighteen years old, and that was considered sufficient. He found her always one of the best of wives.

She died June 29, 1855, leaving a request to Lamartine that he should finish her poem of Madeleine. She said, “ I formerly hoped for much from M. de Lamartine’s friendship. I have always found him kind and obliging, but never wholly devoted. This coldness was the first illusion I was freed from. When I am dead, he will not refuse this my last wish.” But he did; the letter had been written twenty years before her death, and at this time Lamartine felt reluctant to undertake the task, and he declined it.

— M. Littré has collected a certain number of such of his essays as have more general interest into a volume entitled Littérature et Histoire,¹⁰ which is to take its place by the side of his miscellaneous writings on medicine, the barbarians of the Middle Ages, the French language, etc. In his preface he gives his readers a most interesting personal explanation. He says he has not always done what he wanted to do, but that he has never done anything he did not want to do. He reminds us that he has never held an official position as instructor, that his philosophical opinions have been of a sort to act as an insurmountable obstacle, that when in 1871 M. Gambetta appointed him to the chair of history at the Polytechnic School of Bordeaux, the opposition was intense from the clerical journals of the province. He has also stood firm against receiving any decoration. In this volume we find articles contributed to the papers of forty-five years ago, and others of more recent date, but all are characterized by the same solid merit. One of the later articles, written in 1870, compares Aristophanes and Rabelais, the two satirists who saw the coming decay of their respective civilizations. Of Greece he says it would have been necessary, in order to survive shipwreck, that it should have had material power and size sufficient to withstand the numerous encroachments of outsiders, and an intellectual basis capable of enduring the most searching discussion. But the first of these conditions was impossible; even Rome succumbed to outside barbarians, and in ancient times there was not that difference between civilized men and barbarians that there is at present, thanks to the many mechanical inventions. As to the other, the Greek mythology was far from being firmly enough established to resist ridicule and indifference. The only hope seemed to be in trying to recall the past, but that was never successful. What was needed was the scientific spirit. This Aristophanes laughed at, but Rabelais, in his time, felt the forces that were about to regenerate society, and gave expression to them.

In an interesting article about Madame de Sévigné he begins with something of the spirit of the lexicographer, finding in a new edition of the letters certain phrases set right which had given him trouble in making his dictionary. Previous editors had corrected foolishly, stricken out obscure words, explained ineptly; and he gives many examples which show that these letters had suffered more from unworthy hands than have even our old English dramatists. But after this side-play he goes on to write with authority an excellent essay, which may well be commended to readers of French. A good part of it treats instructively of the peculiarities of our language.

Another good article is that on Don Quixote, and it will be, moreover, with some curiosity that the reader will turn to the translations from Schiller, which seem, at any rate to the foreigner, to be accurate and good. Perhaps even more attention will be attracted by M. Littré’s own poems, which have the peculiar merit of his prose writings, namely, that of expressing some thought in intelligible language. Littré is not the only writer of a dictionary who has written poetry. Of these few pieces perhaps La Viellesse is the best. This volume, which is the last one the author proposes to make of selections, certainly contains honorable memorials of a well-spent life, and is deserving of attention.

— Mr. Krez’s poems¹¹ are the tuneful stammerings of an essentially lyrical nature, abounding in feeling, but unendowed with the gift of song. The sentiment, although apparently sincere, is never strong enough to lift the phrase above the commonplace ; it struggles painfully for utterance, takes at times a brief and ill-sustained flight, and then relapses into unmitigated prose.

The situation of a man whose basis of culture is that of the Old World, and whose sympathies and interests constantly draw him away from his actual sphere of life, is, to be sure, not absolutely new, but still offers numerous opportunities for new effects. To the poet, the emigrant life is as yet practically a fallow field. But whether it be in voice or in vision that Mr. Krez is lacking, it is certain that he has either not seen his chances, or, seeing them, has felt the inadequacy of his powers to realize them in song. If occasionally he strikes a true note, the voice of some greater poet invariably vibrates audibly through his verse. If the poem entitled Ein Traumgesicht had been a professed imitation of Heine, could it have struck more distinctly the characteristic Heine chords ? Let any one judge:—

Longing for the Rhine and the lost associations of youth, brooding regret (often with a touch of disdain) at the joylessness of our barren, materialistic life on this side of the ocean, and now and then a characteristically German apostrophe to “Wein, Weib, und Gesang,” — these are the distinctive themes more or less successfully varied, through one hundred and thirtynine pages of Krez’s collection. His verse is often defective in rhythm; his ear is not sensitive enough to manage the subtler cadences in the long - sustained roll of the hexameter. Among the translations, of which the volume contains several, those from Anacreon strike us as the best.

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