has made his few facts float about in a sea of words. His desire also to give due credit to Mr. Boyle's son, who continues the business of sanitary engineering founded by the father, leads him to glide gently into what reads very much like a puff. William E. Burton, A Sketch of his Career, with Recollections of his Performances, by William L. Keese (G. P. Putnam's Sons), is a work that will greatly interest old theatre-goers in New York and elsewhere. It is difficult to say how far it will interest the present generation of readers who know not Burton. We fancy that they will accuse Mr. Keese of neglecting to furnish them with an adequate idea of the great comedian's manner and method, and of those peculiar qualities in his acting which won him a leading place in his ow line. Of the man himself, Mr. Keese paints a faithful portrait. The volume is a just tribute to the memory of an excellent scholar, a fine actor, and a courteous gentleman. The second volume of Leslie Stephens' Dictionary of National Biography (Macmillan) carries the work through Baird. There is a long article on Anselm, and a bright one by the editor on Madame D'Arblay. The account of Benedict Arnold is truthful as to facts, but not as to character. Arnold was not generous or humane. He was a mean man and malignant. The article on Bacon is in two parts. His life is treated by Dr. Gardiner and his works by Professor Fowler. An article which will be read by many with interest is that of Mr. Hutton on Bagehot. By the bye, we think the work would have gained by an American custom of annexing to a name, obscure in pronunciation, the phonetic spelling. Even an Englishman might hesitate between Bājut and Băjut, and Bagot. - Miss Susan Hale's charmingly edited Life and Letters of Thomas Gold Appleton (D. Appleton & Co.) will have a somewhat wider circle of readers than is usually reached by memorials of the kind. Though Mr. Appleton was neither an author nor an artist by profession, he was largely associated with literature and art, and had extensive acquaintance with the leading men of letters and painters on both sides of the Atlantic. The book is the record of a bright, generous, and fortunate gentleman, who got out of wealth all there is to be got out of it -the pleasure of others and one's own intellectual advancement. In the city of Boston, to whose every interest he was devoted, his memory will linger long.

Health and Hygiene. Volume X. of The Sanitary Engineer appears as a bound volume. It is a journal of Civil and Sanitary Engineering and public and private hygiene, conducted by Henry C. Meyer (140 William St., New York). The bringing together into one book of the continued papers, like the correspondence on the Health Exhibition in London and the articles on the sanitary arrangements in the Marquand house, shows how advantageous the work is as a book of reference, as well as a weekly digest. - Consumption, its Nature, Causes, Prevention, and Cure, by J. M. W. Kitchen, M. D. (Putnams): this book is of Value to the laity rather than to the profession. The most suggestive chapter is on the relation of man's surroundings to phthisis, in which the prac

tical modes of prevention, exclusive of medical treatment, are considered at length. - Mental Medicine: a Theoretical and Practical Treatise on Medical Psychology: The Primitive Mind Cure; the Nature and Power of Faith, or Elementary Lessons in Christian Philosophy and Transcendental Medicine. (H. H. Carter & Co., Boston.) These two volumes, by W. F. Evans, attempt to refer disease to mental origin, and therefore to find their cure through mental agencies. "There are," the author says, "within the inclosure of our inner being certain dormant, because unused, spiritual energies and potencies that can save the soul and heal the body of its maladies." Mr. Evans writes as if he believed all that he says, but he has to travel through such a swamp of philosophy to reach his sure ground that most people will hesitate about following him. He gives what he calls an invocation, and says that he sincerely believes there is in it the saving, healing virtue of the name of Christ, and of the principle his name represents. But after one has gone through the extraordinary composition and has even committed it to memory, we suspect he will still be at the entrance only to a reasonable Christian life. It sounds very much like "Lord, Lord!" Dr. S. Weir Mitchell's Lectures on Diseases of the Nervous System, especially in women, has passed to a second revised and enlarged edition. (Leas.) The new edition contains discussion of the difficulties of diagnosis in hysterical diseases of joints, on the relation of hysteria to organic disease of the spine, and on hysterical disorders of the rectum. While the book is strictly a professional one, the author takes so humane a view of his subject that the lay reader will often find most valuable suggestions as to the care of the body quite within ordinary powers The Social History of the Eighth International Medical Congress, held in Copenhagen, August, 1884, by D. B. Delavan (Putnams), is an agreeable little sketch of the good time which the author and his colleagues enjoyed last summer, and includes a programme of the congress.

Economy and Politics. Mr. Edward Atkinson has brought into one volume three papers on What makes the Rate of Wages, What is a Bank, and The Railway, the Farmer, and the Public, all under the general title, The Distribution of Products, or The Mechanism and the Metaphysics of Exchange. (Putnams). Mr. Atkinson has the advantage in his outlook of being both a student and a man of affairs. - European Modes of Living, or The Question of Apartment Houses, by S. G. Young (Putnams), is a pamphlet, in which the writer seeks to persuade her countrymen and countrywomen who live in great cities that Europeans have solved the problem of sensible living more successfully than they. Her desire is to differentiate and show what characteristics of the French flat should be omitted. It strikes us that the author, although at home in Paris, has not lived sufficiently in America. The Thirteenth of the Economic Tracts (The Society for Political Education, New York) is The Standard Silver Dollar and the Coinage Law of 1878, by W. C. Ford. Mr. Ford is not an extremist, and we wish he could

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Education and Text-Books. The New Departure in College Education is the title of a pamphlet in which President McCosh, of Princeton, replies to President Eliot's defense of it in New York. (Scribners.) The reply is vigorous, almost angry, and sometimes also illogical, but the truth remains that the movement is not the work of one man, nor even, strictly speaking, of one college; and, like all such departures, must find its vindication or its refutal in time. - Pindar: the Olympian and Pythian odes, with an introductory essay, notes, and indexes, by B. L. Gildersleeve. (Harpers.) The apparatus is extensive enough to give the moderate Greek scholar some hope of mastering this knotty author. — Schiller's Song of the Bell, edited, with introduction and notes, by C. P. Otis (Holt), has an ingenious and interesting commentary in the form of woodcuts showing different stages in the casting of bells, with the German terms given against the several parts. - Goethe's Iphigenia appears in a French translation, with a preliminary essay on Goethe. The name of translator and editor is not given. (C. Meyrueis, Paris.) The Marquis de Nadaillac's L'Amérique Préhistorique, of which we have here a revised translation, edited by W. H. Dall (G. P. Putnam's Sons), is a work of very great value and interest for American readers. The present edition contains much archæological material not to be found in D'Anvers's translation as published in 1882, and is illustrated with two hundred and nineteen woodcuts. The "Quincy Methods" illustrated; pen photographs from the Quincy schools. (E. L. Kellogg & Co., New York.) A capital book for those who are not able to see the actual classes at work, and indeed very useful to those who can see them; for by means of these accurate reports one can study the whole system minutely and leisurely. It would be a curious comparison which one might draw between this book and Mr. Alcott's Conversations; the objective character of the one set against the subjective method of the other. - Choix de Contes Contemporains, edited with notes by B. F. O'Connor (Holt), is a collection of fifteen sketches or episodes from the writings of Daudet, Coppée, Theuriét, About, Gautier, and De Musset. The preliminary biographical notes are the merest summaries; the notes at the end of the book are commendably brief. - A convenient little handbook has been prepared by a member of the Massachusetts bar under the title: The Power and Authority of School Officers and Teachers in the management and government of public schools and over pupils out of school, as determined by the courts of the several States. (Harpers.) The circum

stantiality of the facts and fullness of the decisions render the book especially valuable. — Fifty Salads, by Thomas J. Murrey (White, Stokes & Allen), is a useful little handbook, containing a number of very desirable receipts.

Literature and Criticism. Obiter Dicta is the title of a small volume reprinted from the English (Scribners), and containing half a dozen light criticisms upon literature, the drama, and practical philosophy. The author is somewhat of a laughing philosopher. He says some witty things, more clever ones, and yet drops into flat commonplace at times. The essays read like the amateur criticisms of some barrister, say, who has a love of literature and a happy conversational art. Much of the book might have been a dinner monologue, addressed to an appreciative neighbor.— Fifty Years among Authors, Books, and Publishers, by J. C. Derby (Carleton): A volume of gossip, together with letters, scraps of verse, and newspaper reports. Mr. Derby's associations brought him into connection with almost everybody, especially in New York, who had to do with books, and his retentive memory has enabled him to set down a great deal that is characteristic. We do not know that the book tells much that has not been told before, and the author's individuality is scarcely as prominent as was S. G. Goodrich's, for example, in a similar book, but it will no doubt be a pile of cinders to many a literary chiffonier hereafter. The final volume of Mr. Mason's series of Personal Traits of British Authors (Scribners) includes sketches of Hood, Macaulay, Smith, Jerrold, Dickens, C. Brontë, and Thackeray. The little chronological tables with which each sketch is prefaced are convenient memoranda. - Discriminate: a manual for guidance in the use of correct words and phrases in ordinary speech. (Appleton.) The very first discrimination strikes us as incorrect. We do say a history, and we do not say a historical novel. Elsewhere the manual is negligent and loose. Take, for example, the next paragraph to which we open. "Don't use curious in the sense of strange or remarkable. Hence don't say "a curious action;""a curious incident; " use strange or remarkable." Here is a waste of words for one thing, and a lack of true discrimination, since no indication is given as to when curious may be used. In fact, a few reasons in this little book would have been worth more than a good many admonitions. The ordinary user of the book will be apt to regard the whole scheme as arbitrary. Les Nouveaux Romanciers Américains, by Th. Bentzon (Calmann Lévy, Paris), is a collection of essays on Howells, James, Cable, Bishop, Crawford, and Fawcett. -Marius, the Epicurean, his Sensations and Ideas, by Walter Pater (Macmillan & Co.), is an account of the intellectual development of a Roman scholar and thinker in the time of Marcus Aurelius. We shall speak in detail of the work hereafter; in the meanwhile we warmly commend Mr. Pater's two volumes to the lovers of exquisite literature.