Comment on New Books

Fiction. The Potter’s Thumb, by Flora Annie Steel. (Harpers.) Mrs. Steel has seldom done better work than is to be found in this novel, or more graphically and convincingly shown her really marvelous knowledge of Indian life, — the life of the native millions as well as that of the ruling thousands. This being so, we the more regret that the complexities of the plot and the occasional allusiveness of the writer’s manner in treating it may somewhat repel certain readers. For, in truth, notwithstanding these drawbacks, the story is profoundly and even painfully interesting. In brief, the tale turns upon the endeavors of the Dewan of Hodinugger to obtain the key of the sluice-gates of the canal, and his use of Mrs. Boynton, an amiable, allfascinating woman, with little heart and an easily persuaded conscience, as an instrument to that end. Between them, the brave, straightforward, honest lad who guards the key is brought to despair and death, while the woman who is mainly responsible for the tragedy goes scatheless. As usual, the very atmosphere of the Hast pervades the story, and, incidentally, we are made vividly conscious of the unchrouicled courage, endurance, and self-sacrifice which hold for England her Indian Empire. — The White Crown, and Other Stories, by Herbert D. Ward. (Houghton.) Readers of The Atlantic will not have forgotten the capital story of The Missing Interpreter which Mr. Ward contributed to it two or three years ago. The ingenuity which he displayed, though marked, was iu fine subordination to the more enduring quality of human portraiture under simple conditions. In his other stories as here collected, there is more than once a disposition to give undue weight to the merely ingenious, and to overvalue the details of invention. In The Semaphore, for example, Mr. Ward has taken infinite pains to understand, and repeat for his readers, the details connected with the management of a signal station on a railway. Yet in the movement of the story all these details choke the action at the most critical point, and we doubt greatly if most readers are patient enough to master them. This is a minor error, however, and is something of an evidence that Mr. Ward is not going to be slovenly in his work. We look to see this interesting book followed by others of the same zest, but with more ordered material. — The Maiden’s Progress, a Novel in Dialogue, by Violet Hunt. (Harpers.) A very “ modern” tale, whose heroine, the daughter of a savant absorbed in his studies, and an amiable, affectionate, but weak mother, is appropriately renamed Moderna by her friends. After going through the usual experiences of a successful débutante, she begins to find the life of society unsatisfying, and so dabbles a little in art and literature, and finally essays a plunge into Bohemia, but is speedily rescued by her earliest and worthiest admirer. The author has insight, vivacity, and humor, and her dialogues are always piquant and entertaining, and sometimes exceedingly clever. Her cynicism is not very profound, nor her satiric exaggeration greater than is permissible in scenes of “genteel comedy,” to adopt a term familiar to our grandparents, and no serious harm comes of her heroine’s escapades. Considering the achievements of some of her compeers, Miss Hunt deserves credit for her self-restraint, and one feels that Moderna, with all her waywardness, will live happy ever after. — The Doomswoman, by Gertrude Atherton. (Tait, Sons & Co.) A story of California just before the American occupation. In a series of brief scenes, the story-teller aims to set forth the old story of fascination of a woman by a man who is an enemy of the house, and to inweave some notion of the life of the day, and the attitude taken by native Californians toward the new-comers. She does not succeed in impressing the reader with the truthfulness of the story, and partly, perhaps, because, although told in the first person, the teller seems singularly outside of it all. — Baron Montez of Panama and Paris, by A. C. Gunter (Home Publishing Co., Now York), is quite another sort of story. Here haughty typewriters, and American business men, and the great blizzard, and conversation as it is, and the Panama canal, and kodaks, and large sums of money, and Paris and New York, with a real street car and conductor, are whipped into a frothy mass in which float, a few crumbs of solid food. — A Modern Wizard, by Rodrigues Ottolengui. (Putnams.) The Wizard laid claim to being a descendant of Mexican priests, and to possessing many secrets which modern science is only now bringing to light. Thus he put himself in the very lead of his time by administering to his two wives the bacilli of diphtheria, and in the end, in order to evade the law against sane murderers, by chaining himself in a crypt, and taking his own newly discovered drug, sanatoxine, which made a maniac of him. It is a fit conclusion for an unbalanced tale.—A Protégé of Jack Hamlin’s, and Other Stories, by Bret Harte. (Houghton.) If Bret Harte is not so altogether interesting as he used to be, it is not because he does not tell his stories so well,—he tells them, on the whole, rather better, — but because his stories are not so well worth telling. In the California of nowadays Bret Harte would not find so much that really suits his literary aptitudes as he found in the California of the fifties. Of those times, the reader of this latest batch of stories will catch, now and then, some affectionate reminiscence. — A Washington Symphony, by Mrs. William Lamont Wheeler, (Putnams.) A knowledge of Washington society is scarcely a substitute for a training in the writing of novels, but perhaps this is not a novel. It has conversation, a few persons who carry the conversation on, and a mystery, which is solved before the book is ended.—Carlotta’s Intended, and Other Stories, by Ruth McEnery Stuart. (Harpers.) Several of these tales show a little effort, a little lack of truth. Possibly the reason is not far to seek. For the most part, these are not stories of negro life, with the humor and pathos of which Mrs. Stuart is so intimately familiar. Of such tales, however, there is one, and a very charming one,— Duke’s Christmas. It seems to come, like the narrative of Miss Murfree, for instance, of Miss Wilkins or Miss Jewett, of a disposition to find a soul of good in things ugly, if not evil ; and of a conviction that the more or less uncouth characters of which these stories tell are abundantly worth knowing. Such a disposition and conviction are natural in the art of a democratic age.—Hypnotic Tales and Other Tales, by James L. Ford. (George H. Richmond & Co., New York.) An amusing collection of Puck stories. The notion of the Hypnotic Tales, that a hypnotist should make all the people in a company tell true stories of their experience, is a clever one, and it is a pity Mr. Ford did not make cleverer use of it. — Charley, a Village Story, by S. D. Gallaudet. (Putnams.) A pathetic little story, told with simplicity and directness, though the various figures, at least the principal ones, lack outline, so to speak, and are done with a wash. — Micah Clarke, the earliest, and as yet the best of Dr. Conan Doyle’s historical novels, has heretofore borne the imprint of the Messrs. Harpers only on the blue paper covers of the Franklin Square Library ; but they have now reissued the work in a handsome cloth-bound volume, and it will doubtless be welcome to many readers, old and new, in this more attractive and permanent farm. — Late issues in Harper’s Franklin Square Library are : Van Bibber and Others, by Richard Harding Davis ; Sarah, a Survival, by Sydney Christian ; A Cumberer of the Ground, by Constance Smith ; and With the Help of the Angels, by Wilfrid Woollam. Love and ShawlStraps, by Annette L. Noble, appears as the first volume of Putnams’ Hudson Library ; and The Queen of Ecuador, by R. M. Manley, begins the Traveller’s Library ( The Hagemann Publishing Co.). Weyman’s The House of the Wolf is reprinted in the Globe Library (Rand, McNally &, Co.), and the same publishers issue The Red Sultan, by J. Maelaren Cobban. Another paper-covered novel is The Bachelor of the Midway, by the Author of Dr. Jack. (The Mascot Publishing Co.)

Poetry the Drama. We have received from Longmans new editions of Owen Meredith’s Lucile, The Wanderer, and Selected Poems. In an Introduction to this last volume, the author’s daughter, Lady Betty Balfour, writes with discrimination of her father’s work, but does not help matters at this late day by giving the reasons for the failure of successive volumes to capture either the public or the critics. No such apology would have been needed had Lord Lytton put into much of his verse the directness and grasp that mark such a poem, for example, as Twins, unpublished before the appearance of these Selected Poems. The text of The Wanderer follows that of the first edition, 1857 ; and wise it was to discard the changes by which the author, in later life, sought to make these poems of youth conform with the thoughts of middle age. Lucile, even in new dress, strikes the pathetic note of a song that is no longer sung. What sadder fate is there than that which overtakes sheet music that is turning yellow without winning the dues of lovely old age ! — Columbus the Discoverer, a Drama, by Walter Warren. (Arena Publishing Co., Boston.) Mr. Warren does not scrimp his stage. Some forty figures appear and disappear, besides the citizens, officers, soldiers, courtiers, sailors, settlers, women, etc. No doubt Columbus had to do with quite as many persons in real life, but the dramatist’s art demands more selection and concentration. In his desire, moreover, to make his drama properly psychological, Mr. Warren appears to have resolved it into a sort of conversational narrative.—Theatricals, Two Comedies, by Henry James, (Harpers.) Mr. James has no hesitation in acknowledging that these plays “ had not the good fortune to consort ” with the conditions under which it was hoped that they would be presented upon the stage. He accordingly recommends his “melancholy subterfuge ” of printing the pieces in a book “ to his numerous fellow-sufferers,” Truly, it does not seem extraordinary that the comedies, and particularly Tenants, the first, were not deemed suitable for acting. One is fully aware that a play which “ reads well ” may, for the same causes, act ill ; but the contrary position, that reading ill means acting well, could hardly be maintained. It cannot be said that either of these plays reads especially well. The plot of the second, Disengaged, being an adaptation of one of Mr. James’s short stories, is far the cleverer of the two ; but in each the dialogue has the fatal quality of sounding nearly always like the careful, characteristic English of Mr. James, and not like the speech of persons who are shown in many ways to be but every-day mortals. Yet is it not a form of praise to say that an author fails to put appropriate words into the mouths of commonplace characters ? — El Nuevo Mundo, by Louis James Block. (Charles H. Kerr & Co., Chicago.) It is not altogether easy to divine Mr. Block’s argument in this dignified verse. He makes a poetical survey of history, with the view, apparently, of discovering the growth of the conception of liberty, and finds at last the consummation in America. There are fine phrases, and the general impression produced by the poem is that of a loftiness of design fairly well sustained ; but there is an impression also of vagueness, as if somewhat too wide a landscape was surveyed for any distinct, well-composed picture. — Allegretto, by Gertrude Hall. Illustrated by Oliver Herford. (Roberts.) If the verses in this book are not invariably satisfactory, it is because the labor of the file has been spared. The thought is nearly always suitable for a maker of what Mr. Austin Dobson calls “ familiar verse ; ” and when Miss Hall has taken the trouble, or has had the happy fortune, to do her work well, it is charming. Much of the rhyming is for young readers, and the illustrations are delightfully appropriate. Taken for all in all, they stand upon a level more constantly high than that of the verses, and in a few instances, as for example in A Kitten, their cleverness is the salvation of the rhymes. — The Fairest of the Angels, and Other Verse, by Mary Colborne-Veel. (Horace Cox, London.) A volume of poems by a writer in New Zealand. There is a delicate fancy and a pure, cheerful sentiment pervading these verses which commend them to readers of refinement. Now and then a stronger note is struck, and one comes to believe that the writer may some time do even better things ; for there is no forcing of the note. It is a simple, sometimes playful fancy that controls rather than a vivid imagination, but here again the fancy comes easily.

Sociology and Finance. Pleasure and Progress. An Attempt to prove that the Pursuit of Pleasure is the sine qua non of Intellectual, Moral and Social Development, and that the Promotion of Pleasure is the Duty of Philanthropy and Statesmanship. By Albert M. Lorentz. (The Truth Seeker Co., New York.) The proper publisher for this entertaining though scarcely conclusive book would be the Half-Truth Finder Company. After reading the author’s diagnosis of our social disorders, one looks eagerly for the remedy, and finds it to consist in executing the law of Individual Sovereignty ; and on further inquiry, this is to be brought about by Wholesale Distribution on the part of the government. “Each can then work according to inclination, and indulge according to desert ; none need then want, if he is willing to work.” — Prisoners and Paupers. A Study of the Abnormal Increase of Criminals and the Public Burden of Pauperism in the United States ; the Causes and Remedies. By Henry M. Boies. (Putnams.) There is an undercurrent of thought in this book which we are likely to meet frequently hereafter, namely, a recognition of the paramount interests of society in any concern for the individual. Thus, Mr. Boies holds firmly to the opinion, which appears to be gaining ground, that the only course to be taken with the deplorably vicious is to seclude them from the world, especially with a view to checking the increase of the vicious class through reproduction. It may be so, but possibly there lurks in the principle that as yet ill-defined defect which may be characterized as social selfishness, a most portentous evil, which is attending the development of a conscious socialism. — Progressive Taxation in Theory and Practice, by Edwin R. A. Seligman. (American Economic Association, Ithaca, N. Y.) The simplest definition of progressive taxation would seem to be, taxation at a rate which increases with the increase of the income, and Mr. Seligman undertakes to show how this principle has been more or less involved in schemes of taxation from the outset. A graduated income tax has, in the United States, rarely found adequate expression, but he seems to look for a more thorough application of the principle in the case of corporations. He anticipates the day in America when federal taxation will consist in “a well-considered system of indirect taxes, possibly supplemented at intervals by some form of a direct land or income tax. State revenues will be derived almost exclusively from corporation taxes and inheritance taxes, while real estate will be relegated to the local divisions.” — Elements of Life Insurance, by M. M. Dawson. (The Independent Printing and Publishing Co., Chicago.) A clearly written treatise, dealing with the principles which underlie the various forms of life insurance, and the application in the conduct of the business. The book no doubt has its value chiefly for those engaged in the organization of companies, but it is interesting reading to all students of society, for it is not impossible that in this association we have the basis for a farreaching organization of social relations, not perhaps superseding savings-banks, but extending their scope. — Governments and Politicians, Ancient and Modern, by Charles Marcotte. (The Author, Chicago.) In a high tone of voice the writer inveighs against democratic institutions, calls upon all inhabitants of a republic to see how much better a monarchy is, and to Americans, especially, points out the inconsistencies between their beliefs and their practices. Much of what he says has a basis of truth, though there is not in the method of its deliverance that philosophic breadth and sureness which one would expect, from the author of a circular accompanying the book ; for there we read, “ This treatise refutes the ideas of Voltaire, Rousseau, Thomas Paine, Bentham, Mills [sic], Victor Hugo, R. G. Ingersoll, C. W. Eliot, and other philosophers.” — An Introduction to the Study of the Dependent, Defective, and Delinquent Classes, by Charles Richmond Henderson. (Heath.) Among Dependents are the homeless and orphans ; among Defectives, blind and deaf mutes, the insane, the feeble - minded ; among Delinquents, criminals, political, occasional, habitual, professional, and instinctive. It helps to make these distinctions, since upon a just discrimination depends much of the value of such therapeutic agencies as are at the disposition of society. Dr. Henderson analyzes the whole subject with care, and though he aims at a scientific discussion, his real interest is a humane one, and looks to a sound and healthy condition of Society out of love for humanity, and not out of professional zeal.

History and Biography. Noah Porter, a Memorial by Friends. Edited by George S. Merriam. (Scribners.) Stern justice, if that must be involved, would emphasize the fact that the book before us is a memorial by friends ; that it lovingly and unconsciously puts President Porter’s life in the perspective of its importance to his own world rather than to the world at large. Nevertheless, the world at large should be interested in preserving an ample, adequate memory of this most notable representative of a type of college president. For whatever else may be said of that type, it had in it an element of permanent strength ; it set character above scholarship. Though, unfortunately, it also hampered the freedom of scholarship by the authority of tradition, at all events it produced in Noah Porter a nobly efficient man. — Maximilian and Carlotta, a Story of Imperialism, by John M. Taylor. (Putnams.) The time has not yet come for a complete and authoritative history of the latest Mexican empire to be written, but Mr. Taylor has constructed from such materials as are easily accessible an intelligent and well-arranged narrative. He tells the story of the empire from its inception to its tragic close, and writes fairly and sympathetically of the two principal actors, or rather victims ; the pair to whom nature and fortune had given so many good gifts, and who were so strangely and fatally misplaced amidst the turmoils of a Mexican revolution. The author’s style is somewhat crude and over-rhetorical, but he is so deeply interested in his subject, which is in itself so interesting, that he seldom fails to hold the reader’s attention. If the latter is of a literal turn of mind, he will find the writer’s various references to “ Hapsburg House ” slightly confusing ; for in this, so to speak, residential manner Mr. Taylor usually designates the house of Hapsburg-Lorraine. — Recollections of a Virginian in the Mexican, Indian, and Civil Wars, by General Dabney Herndon Maury. (Scribners.) A frank, hearty, and entertaining narrative, in which the Virginian pride in family and associations is delightfully expressed. General Maury tells his brief anecdotes well, and is far from being a mere random storyteller. One of the most amusing and honorable passages in his life was when, after the war for the Union was over, he set up a school, and then ran away from it as soon as the boys began to come, leaving it in the hands of a capable teacher. That is a characteristic sentence in which he states that McClellan, for whom he had a high regard, was in sympathy with the Southern States, yet “ never wavered in his natural allegiance to Pennsylvania.” There is a whole history of a Southerner’s mind in that sentence. — My Paris Note-Book, by the Author of An Englishman in Paris. (Lip— pincott.) Two years ago, An Englishman in Paris had for a short time a quite exceptional success ; its compiler, in describing the supposed author, having adroitly made it appear that he could be no less a personage amongst the English in Paris than the late Sir Richard Wallace, and some critics were deceived who should have been slower to do such injustice to that gentleman’s memory. The “Englishman” proved to be a Parisian journalist of Dutch extraction, a considerable portion of whose recollections antedated his birth. The NoteBook is greatly inferior to the earlier work in cleverness and readability. To compensate for a rather scanty supply of material, everything is told at the utmost possible length, including certain stories of “ my uncle,” said to have been related by the Emperor Louis Napoleon to the greatuncles of the writer. The conversations, however, are hardly convincing, and the revelations contained therein are mostly second-hand tales. The author has neither the lightness of touch nor the literary grace which may give a certain value even to idle gossip, and his latest volume does not rise above the level of “personal ” journalism.— Two German Giants, Frederic the Great, and Bismarck, the Founder and the Builder of the German Empire, by John Lord, D. D., LL. D. (Fords, Howard & Hulbert.) All the unity this book possesses is brought out in this, the main portion of its title-page. Except that one man delivered the two lectures that make up the bulk of the volume, and that the subject in each instance was a “ German Giant,” there is no connection between them. Nor is the general cohesion strengthened by the addition of Bayard Taylor’s Character Sketch, of Prince Bismarck, and the “ Iron Chancellor’s ” speech before the Reichstag in 1888 on enlarging the German army. Nevertheless, each section of the book has an interest and value of its own. — Heinrich Heine’s Life Told in His Own Words. Edited by Gustav Karpeles. Translated by Arthur Dexter. (Holt.) An intensely interesting patchwork of poems, letters, and memoirs. They give us the man, — his morbid self-consciousness, the lack of complete dignity and self-respect, the almost unearthly conjunction of wit, humor, and pathos, and his deep - down earnestness. Strange incongruity of a man in motley wearing the sword, as ho himself said, “ of a brave soldier in the Liberation War of humanity ” ! His cap and bells we never can keep quite out of sight and hearing, but we shall remember Heine most by token of the sword with which he smote the Philistines.

Psychology. Psychology, Descriptive and Explanatory, a Treatise of the Phenomena, Laws, and Development of Human Mental Life, by George Trumbull Ladd. (Scribners.) Professor Ladd belongs to the older school of psychologists, who are ready to accept the results of physiological and biological investigation, but refuse to limit their inquiries to such contributions. The phenomena of the human mind, they believe, cannot all be referred to somatic influences, and in their study of the will especially they discover a process of development which supposes psychic laws not to be crowded back into the physiological envelope. The volume before us has great value as a full, vigorous, and independent study, which takes up material from a large and varied supply without loss to the writer’s own productive power. — Cock Lane and Common Sense, by Andrew Lang. (Longmans.) Mr. Lang’s last, appearance was in a book of verses ; tbe next may be in literary history, letters to the shades of the great, or what not. Though there is hardly any telling where he will “turn up,” it is almost certain that he will present himself attractively. This book is a series of essays on subjects of psychical research and the like. As the author’s Custom and Myth showed the permanence of certain folk stories throughout the world’s history, the present volume sets forth the resemblances between psychic phenomena of widely various times and places. Clearly, no single age or country can boast a monopoly of levitation, second-sight, spirittappings, and haunted houses. It is amusing, by the way, to remember in connection with the treatment of this last topic the clever lines The Haunted Homes of England, in the recent volume of verses.— The Law of Psychic Phenomena, a Working Hypothesis for the Systematic Study of Hypnotism, Spiritism, Mental Therapeutics, etc., by Thomson Jay Hudson. (MeClurg.) Mr. Hudson essays to bring the results of a number of students and experimenters into a comprehensive order, and his working hypothesis which is to systematize these results is that the duality of man furnishes the explanation. He presents this hypothesis in three terms : that man has two minds, an objective and a subjective ; that the objective mind is constantly amenable to control by suggestion ; and that the subjective mind is incapable of inductive reasoning.

Science. The Physiology of the Senses, by John Gray M’Kendrick and William Snodgrass. (Scribners.) One of the series of University Extension Manuals. The aim of the book, as explained in the preface, is “to give a succinct account of the functions of the organs of sense as these are found in man and the higher animals.” The work is confined pretty strictly to this purpose, and the authors appear to have yielded only in a very slight degree to the temptation to make excursions into the field of physiological psychology. — The Science of Mechanics, a Critical and Historical Exposition of its Principles, by Dr. Ernst Mach. Translated from the second German edition by Thomas J. McCormack. (The Open Court Publishing Co., Chicago.) I)r. Mach’s method is to treat successively the development of the principles of statics and dynamics by reference to the results obtained by the great philosophers, from Archimedes downward, subjecting each to a critical analysis. Then he considers the extension of the principles discovered in the deduction of modern science, and finally examines the formal as distinguished from the deductive development of physical science. A brief final chapter discusses the relations of mechanics to other departments of knowledge. — Total Eclipses of the Sun, by Mabel Loomis Todd. (Roberts.) The first volume in the Columbian Knowledge Series. A lively and well-illustrated little book, which is descriptive, explanatory, historical, and readable. Mrs. Todd answers, before they are asked, all the questions that the layman would be likely to ask regarding this curious subject.

Religion. The Spirit of God, by P. C. Mozoomdar. (Geo. H. Ellis, Boston.) A most interesting book in its personal, and probably to a large extent representative expression of the fusion of Christianity and Hinduism in the faith of the Brahmo-Somaj. How active is the life which results we cannot say ; it is not easy to determine in any such statement the devotional, contemplative spirit and the energizing principle. But there is a very sweet, pure note in this volume, rendering it a beautiful exposition of one of the cardinal doctrines of the Christian faith, and helping the Christian student to an apprehension of the universality of the doctrine. — The Meaning and the Method of Life, a Search for Religion in Biology, by George M. Gould. (Putnams.) Dr. Gould essays to explain, through living organisms, the presence of the invisible force which makes them living. But does he not make a fundamental error in separating the apparently active organisms from the apparently inactive ones ? Perhaps, if his theory could carry with it a more penetrating sight, he would double the force of the theory. Behind his cloud of words there is light which breaks through now and then in a warming as well as illuminating fashion. — How to Begin to Live Forever, by J. M. Hodson. (Randolph.) Neither better nor worse than a thousand and one other sermon-like tracts — still unpublished.

Travel and Adventure. Hawaii, by Anne M. Prescott. (Chas. A. Murdock & Co., San Francisco.) A paper-covered book of 250 pages, giving, apparently, in the form of letters, a variety of bits of information, comment, and sentiment respecting Hawaii, by a lady who appears to have been a resident, and perhaps a teacher, in Honolulu. It is intelligently written ; it yields rather frequently to the seductive charm of the air, but it is in good taste. An appendix gives considerable statistical and recent historical information. Miss Prescott’s sympathy appears to be with the late queen, but it is not obtruded. — The Kingdom of the “ White Woman,” a Sketch, by M. M. Shoemaker. (Robert Clarke & Co., Cincinnati.) Fifteen years ago Mr. Shoemaker spent a winter in Mexico, when it had not become the great resort for travelers it now is, and this volume is, in effect, the portfolio of a man of letters, — studies, sketches, occasional pictures ; many of them interesting either in subject or treatment, and none over-labored. The book, besides, has several half-tone pictures, chiefly of views, which poorly represent the author’s own artistic sense. — Famous Adventures and Prison Escapes of the Civil War. (The Century Co.) A group of seven sketches detailing such thrilling experiences as Colonel Rose’s Tunnel at Libby Prison, the Locomotive Chase in Georgia, and the Escape of General Breckinridge. The adventures and exploits were on both sides, and the narrators are those who took some part in the scenes. Thus the stories are at first hand, and they form a permanent contribution to our history. Such incidents make novels tame.

Textbooks and Education. Logic, Inductive and Deductive, by William Minto. (Scribners.) One of the University Extension Manuals. Professor Minto has attempted, in this manual, to put the study of logical formulæ on a historical basis, and to increase the power of logic as a practical discipline. In the latter regard, he has rendered his book especially valuable by taking illustrations of errors from familiar and yet far-reaching instances, and introduces thus a considerable body of highly instructive fact. Throughout the book one perceives the presence of a quickening spirit. —The Science of Education, by Johann Friedrich Herbart. (Heath.) The translation of this classic of pedagogy, published first in Germany in 1806, must prove of inestimable service to teachers, particularly to those—and they are many — who forever tend to shrink and harden into mere schoolmasters. It will enlarge their conception of the aim and scope of education, and put mere instruction in its right perspective. At the same time, it will give to the part the schoolmaster plays a new meaning and dignity. The new philosophy will pick a few flaws — the wonder will be how very few —in Herbart’s ethics and psychology, and in his application of these sciences to education ; but the enthusiasm and large - mindedness of the book before us must make it, for teachers, permanently inspiring. — Public Libraries in America, by William I. Fletcher. (Roberts.) To a reading man this little volume is truly fascinating, for it sets forth in excellent order the history, function, organization, and methods of public libraries ; it shows what is to be expected; it illustrates buildings and librarians ; and is throughout marked by precision, good judgment, and enthusiasm. To the young man or woman entering on the noble vocation of librarianship it is of great service, and a patriotic American may well take pride in the movement which it celebrates. — History of Modern Philosophy, by Richard Falckenberg. (Holt.) The translation before us, by Professor Armstrong of Wesleyan, is from the second edition (1892) of Professor Falckenberg’s admirable work. It has the benefit, however, of additions and corrections sent on by the author, and of a practically new section on British and American philosophy by the translator. Thus we have here, for the period which the history covers, —the period from Nicolas of Cusa to the present time, — the latest, and, for its purposes, the best compendious account of modern philosophy. It will serve not only, of course, as a textbook, hut for the general reader as well. — Elementary Composition and Rhetoric, by W. E. Mead. (Leach, Shewell & Sanborn, Boston.) The most vital thing in this little book is Professor Mead’s belief that students should be brought up to look upon composition not as a mere school exercise, but as something real. For this very reason, oddly enough, Professor Mead devotes a third of his book to stock subjects, model plans, and the like, instead of emphasizing the uselessness and the danger of doing anything but inducing a pupil to choose subjects out of his own experience, and to treat them in his own way. To such, however, as seem hopelessly blind to their own experience, this simple and generally sensible little book may be of some transient use. Otherwise it hardly makes good any reason for existence. — The Step-Ladder, a Collection of Prose and Poetry, designed for Use in Children’s Classes in Elocution, and for Supplementary Reading in Public and Private Schools, by Margaret A. Klein. (A.S. Barnes & Co., New York.) A better selection than one usually limbs in books of this class, though it is not altogether easy to see the ground of the compiler’s classification or the end to be attained.

Essays and Reprints. Ruminations, The Ideal American Lady, and Other Essays, by Paul Siegvolk. (Putnams.) There is an air of sobriety about these papers which takes one back to a school of staid American writers who followed Irving at a distance, Tuckerman being perhaps the best illustration of the class. The reflections are sensible, eminently respectable, and sometimes charged with solid wisdom, but the manner is not very enlivening, and the leisure which they suggest is a somewhat sleepy leisure. The topics touched on, or rather handled, are, Concerning Women, Touches of Nature, Every-Day Talk, Shreds of Character, Social Hints and Studies, Author and Artist, Concerning Life and Death. — In Maiden Meditation, by E. V. A. (MeClurg.) The compiler and writer of this little book describes it as a “simple record of a woman’s moods, caprices, tendernesses, dreams.” Under the titles. After the Ball, After Dinner, After Church, After a Wedding, After One Summer, she embroiders upon her own personal reflection suggestions from her reading so deftly that it is not easy to say what is her own and what borrowed. The general effect is light and agreeable, and perhaps the secret is disclosed when she says : “ Often when sewing or dressing, I have before me a book with marked passages or a newspaper clipping that I am conning again and again, or I am repeating some verse or sentiment that has struck my fancy. I believe that the most delightful and satisfactory education is gained in this way, little by little, until it is wrought in the memory, is a part of one’s being, and seems but the echo of one’s thought.” But. not every one can thus make bits of stuff form a graceful pattern. — Two more numbers of the Temple Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing (Macmillan), continue the pleasure which this delightful little edition is giving readers of Shakespeare. We might almost say “readers” in distinction from “students,” Since the scheme of editing is such as to be most agreeable to those who wish to enjoy their Shakespeare intelligently.