jural Science' and the Arts of Agriculture and Pisciculture, Domestic Coo including lighting, heating, meat preservation, &c., Materia Medica and Therapeutics and Public Health. Obviously this is not a volume to review at length. We should say that to editors of newspapers, who stund in need of a cheaply acquired ommiscience, this record Will be an undisguised blessing. Seriously, however, nobody possessed of any acieutific culture can take it up without interest or lay it down without regret. nparatixe Zoology, Structural and Sytematic. "By Jataea Ont0x, 'AM. "New York; Harpers, 1876, An excellent little Manual, superbly illustrated, The author justly eschews con-it in an educational rally accepted facts. ive ground thus laid open, Mr. Orton is a safe and intelligent Although it nowhere claims to torve as an introduction to the advanced *peculations of the naturalists who within our days have gone far towards revolutionising not only biology but psychology, it appears to us that the special value of this book lies in the sure foundation it lays for a rational appreciation of the labours of Darwin, Huxley, Haeckel, Lewes, and Spencer.' We notice one weak point. "Life," the author, "is the cause of organisation, not the re sult of it." Now supposing this assertion to be true, it throws no whatsoever on the qnestion—What is life? But in fact it assumes too much and proves too much. It assumes that life is antecedent to organisation or in other words that the lowest living forms possess no trace of organs. But this isto assert that because we cannot find organs they are certainly not present, a proposition which no scientific person in these days of constant advatico in microscopic power for a moment, On the it proves too much, for nobody who has studied the formation of crystals in fine films of saturated solutions, will feel yesed to deny organisation in the strict the mineral world. And, further, if life is the cause of organisation, how isit that, on the Author's own showing, the lowest living forms have no organs. We confess with pleasure that, but for this blot, the chapter om life, exhibiting as it does the nature and extent of our ignorance, not of our knowledge, is unexceptionable. It is a thousand times more important that we should know our ignorance than that we should parade our real and supposed knowledge, Cripps, the Carrier: by RD. Buacraone, Now York, Harper, me Mr. Blackmore has now for some years wares before a micro or without doubt, to hi cated a class of readers to enjoy scenery description elalaborated asno writer of fiction of our acquaintance has attempted to elaborate it.
plots are of the simplest, nay His mere incarnations of imperfectly conceived ideas, His language is studiously archaic, and through this, though never obscure, sometimes not quite fond of qui tions taken from the English Bible, and of inversions and ragged sentence rendi that suggest a conscious or uncos i Carlyle, By this we do not mean to imply that Blackmore's literary style is a bad one, or even one not to our taste. But it is very a bad one, as Macaulay said of his own style. So' much for the setting of the story. The story itself is to our mind beyond praise. Let those pass it by who require high seasoning. Th Ger and no adultery. Forgery there adapted strictly to the end in jew—the of @ simple village mai died 110 a i ig of of episodes naturally arising in the course of ordinary provincial life, and it is the naturalness of the links which unite the common with the uncommon, that coustitutes one of the main claims of the story considered as a picture of actual life.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.