not an attempt to reproduce the characteristics of the Greek tragedy; as even the form is not true to that model, and the matter is "anachronistic." And nothing in the poem is more modern and unhellenic than the predominance of the Christian and romantic feeling for nature in all her phases, and her poet's reading his own moods into nature. The ballads which close the book-" Gudrun,' ," "Roland's Horn" and "Lexington," are not to our thinking so happy as his other poems. Mr. Weeks has not the swing, the ring and the moodless objectivity of the true ballad writer. "Lexington" is the best because the least of a ballad. It portrays New England on that eventful day when With open hand she stood The seed of quickening food For both the hemispheres. Summa, the book entitles Mr. Weeks to a creditable place among our secondary poets. MEMORIAS de la Comision del Mapa Geolójico de Espana. Descripcion fisica, geolojica, y agrolojica de la Provincia de Cuenca por Daniel de Cortazar, Ingeniero de Minas, e Individuo de la Sociedad geolojica de Francia. Pp. 407. Lex. 8vo. Madrid, 1875. This handsome, well printed and copiously illustrated volume gives evidence of a scientific activity, which has promise for the future of Spain. That great historic land has too long looked to the new world for wealth, and spent her energies in subduing the forces of nature in America. At home, in and under her own soil, are neglected sources of wealth, which far exceed all that the new world could give her. And when her agriculture is improved and her mines worked for the supply of her own founderies and workshops, the financial burdens which now oppress her will seem a trifle that she can easily bear. It is especially promising to find among her scientific men sound and hopeful views of economic questions, such as, if generally diffused, must stimulate by hope and effort instead of paralyzing both by those teachings of despair, which in so many parts of Europe pass for wisdom. We quote from the introduction to Señor de Cortazar's chapter on "Cultivation," as confirmed by his profes sional studies: "We can distinguish different periods in the progress of the cultivations of a country but we can not easily establish a constant law for it; for the variety of soils, conditions and situation of every territory forbids this. "We will however give a rapid history of the cultivation of the earth, endeavoring to discover the law which rules humanity on this subject. "Having passed the first epochs of society in which the community of labor and of wealth is a settled fact, and in which the nomad life is the only one possible to people given up to hunting, fishing and tending cattle, man establishes himself in a fixed spot; and then the epoch of cultivation begins; but in order that an isolated being might take the first step in this new way of living where must he establish himself? where must he settle? "The choice is reduced to the means at his disposal; his instruments are extremely imperfect and of the coarsest kind, and the help which he might expect from his fellows is entirely wanting, since the individuals find themselves at a given moment, distributed over a large space of land and separated from each other by long distances difficult to cross. If on the other hand, we suppose it probable that the first husbandman was a man whom physical weakness prevented from following his companions in their wandering lives, we must consider him very helpless and needy. "An individual with so few resources could not undertake the cultivation of a soil which required great works of preparation; the fertile valleys and gentle slopes occupied by large trees or thick briers, by impetuous torrents or stagnant pools of water, from which deleterious miasmas spread themselves around, presented to him difficulties too insuperable for them to be of any use in the short time which he could wait for his crops, since the stock of provisions on which he could depend was insignificant. "In these circumstances, everything not only invited but compelled him to begin his cultivation, on the poor and light soils of high lands, where there were no large trees to cut or uproot, and no drainage to make: and besides this, such grounds were the only ones in which he could make furrows with a stick of wood in order to throw there some seed, and where the work, on account of its facility, could be individual, that is, without having to call in the help of man or the strength of animals, not yet trained, or the combinations of mechanics as yet entirely unknown. "The crop will be small, but even then it will supply the husbandman with more food than he used to obtain, while running, in search of game, over a space one thousand times larger than the part now cultivated; and though, until harvest time comes, the primitive farmer is still compelled, through necessity, to provide for his daily subsistence by hunting and fishing, yet, when the first fruits shall have been gathered, he will have a stock of provisions which will allow him to devote a part of his time to perfecting his instruments of labor, with which in the following year, the field work being better done, his crops will be greater in amount. Thus will a time come also, when with the advantage of association resulting from the in crease of his family, and with his instruments constantly improving, he will be able to cutivate the most fertile lands, rooting out the trees and shrubs which might be in his way, and which at first he could not even attack. "In this manner, and from generation to generation, will the progress of agriculture move from the poorest soils to the richest, from which will necessarily result an increasing facility of production; or in other words, a quantity of food obtained with less work, leaving at the same time a certain quantity of work to be employed in other things, different from those destined to procure for himself and family the necessary food. "Laying aside, for the present, the efforts which man makes to obtain in all soils greater results every year, by improving his methods of tilling the ground, we will direct our attention to the fact that society, in the first period of its agricultural history, has traveled invariably from the poorest soils to the most productive. "An observation of such transcendental importance in its consequences had not been remarked by any one, until Mr. Carey, in the year 1848', brought it to notice, as presenting itself universally in the history of the human race, and by this result of an attentive observation of facts, destroyed, so to speak, the generally prevalent idea, that man, in the origin of society, when he had all kind of soils at his disposal, began by settling at once in the most fertile and productive parts of the land. "To-day all the world understands that this theory is inadmissible from the impossibility of its execution, as testified by the history of all nations aud confirmed by reason. In consequence of this the theories of Ricardo and Malthus have fallen into the most just discredit. "From the short summary which we have given of the history of cultivation, following the ideas of those North American economists, who, leaving off all speculation, have attended only to what is established by facts, we are able to draw great consequences applicable to the future of any country considered in its agrarian aspect; keeping in sight the past and present conditions in which its cultivation of the ground happened to be. "The tilling of the land is the foundation of all industries; the germ of the prosperity and wealth of all nations; and yet in Spain it has been struggling for a long time with extraordinary difficulties, being almost always opposed by vexatious regulations from those who ought to give it protection; and most wretched in its workings, through the ignorance of those who follow it as a business." The Past, the Present and the Future. Philadelphia, 1848. SOME BOOKS FOR CHILDREN. [Captain Sam. By George Cary Eggleston. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.-Boys of Other Countries. By Bayard Taylor. Same publishers.. The Boys of '76. A History of the Battles of the Revolution. By Charles Carleton Coffin. New York: Harper & Bros.- Young Folks' Centennial Rhymes. By Will Carleton. Same publishers.. Snowed Up; or, The Sportsman's Club in the Mountains. Harry Castlemon. Philadelphia: Porter & Coates.-Frank Nelson in the Forecastle; or, The Sportsman's Club among the Whalers. By Harry Castlemon. Same publishers.—Roddy's Ideal. By Helen K. Johnson. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.] By Yet Few people can be found who think it worth while to give much consideration to what sort of books their children shall read for their entertainment, or, perhaps better still, what they shall not read. In a vague way it is felt that there should be some sort of control, but beyond the tabooing of actual "novels" and works positively vicious, it is not in general felt that duty requires us to go. those of us who stop to think how much deeper, for the most part, are the impressions made on the mind by works of the imagination we read as children than by those we read as men and women, must be convinced that here is a subject it is dangerous to neglect. As there are men who can distinctly trace back a great part of their active love of honor and manliness to the reading of Scott's novels in youth, so there are those who can recognize a permanent influence exerted by imaginative literature at even a more tender age, and many more, doubtless, in whom the influences have been entirely unconscious but still a power for good or for evil. If then we do not avail ourselves of the aid of works of fiction in the moralizing of our children, is it not the least we can do to guard carefully against demoralizing them? The ill effects of the war are to be seen in boys' books, the admirable works of Capt. Mayne Reid, and the prolific productions of Mr. Jacob Abbott being almost altogether supplanted by the sensational, flashy "Oliver Optic" books and the like. In books for girls there has been a somewhat different turn; and an undoubted improvement upon the old, sentimental, "goody" writers, is to be found in the realistic school of which Miss Alcott and Mrs. Whitney are shining lights. But this school gives already some indications of decline, and we may hope therefore for something soon still better. Mr. George Cary Eggleston, known to the reading public by previous works in a different line, has of late happily turned his attention to juvenile literature; and with a success that makes it a subject of congratulation on both sides; principally, perhaps, because he gives promise of still better work in the same direction. Captain Sam is a story of the performances of a party of boys in the war of 1812-somewhat improbable, doubtless, but not the worse for that; it is not necessary that works of this class should stick so close to the probabilities as those intended for more mature minds, and this one does not violate them badly. Its tone is gentlemanly, healthy and vigorous; and a boy should come from it with something of the same exhilaration as from a run in the open air. There is not much of the war in it, but a good deal of life in the woods of the South, and an abundance of incident. The interest is well kept up, the moral tone is unexceptionable, and there is incidental information and suggestions that should stir up a bright lad to think and observe for himself. It is to be heartily commended; but the illustrations are not so commendable. Mr. Bayard Taylor's Boys of Other Countries is also a capital book, relating, for a great part, facts of Mr. Taylor's own experience of travel. The boys we are introduced to are of Sweden, Egypt, Iceland, Germany and Russia; so that various boyish manners and customs are told about, all sufficiently different from young American ways, and a comparison being not always to the advantage of the latter. Others besides Mr. Taylor might learn something from Lars of Sweden, the first and perhaps most attractive boy in the book. The tales are told in a straightforward, simple style, and will surely interest the class of readers for whom they are written. The volume contains information, and the pictures are fairly good. Mr. Coffin is well known by his previous books (My Days and Nights on the Battle-field, Following the Flag, etc.,) as a graphic and generally accurate writer; and while The Boys of '76 seems to show some marks of haste, it is decidedly one of the best books of the season for youthful readers. The plan has been to carry four young men, playfellows from the same village, through all of the prominent military events of the Revolution, but the thread of fiction, on which the history is hung, is wisely a very slender one; so slender in fact as to disappear almost entirely in many parts of the book, and in no part does it monopolize more attention than to add to the realism of the narrative. The story of the Revolution has probably never before been told to youths so graphically, nor, perhaps, so correctly; and the book is an admirable supplement to Mr. Higginson's Young Folks' History, which in some respects it resembles, but which it exceeds in size, and in detail, of course. Probably youthful readers cannot get elsewhere so clear a conception of the military movements of the Revolution as in Mr. Coffin's pages, and the political questions are in general fairly treated so far as they are touched upon. There may be at times a little patriotic exuberance of coloring, but we do not meet the violent denunciation of the enemy that used to be so common in books of this class; we are indeed falling on better times in this regard. The volume is profusely illustrated, with some 300 cuts, which are largely illustrations, in the better sense of |