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the intensely interesting nature of the subjects it discusses. There is probably no book in any language which gives so full, so clear, and so perfectly intelligible an account of the earlier stages of the development of animals. The phenomena described are, as compared with the later stages of development, simple and easily followed, but it is impossible to exaggerate their importance; and as enabling any intelligent person to obtain a correct knowledge of the facts of this wonderful history in its earlier, and a correct conception of their general outlines and bearing in their later and more complex stages, the work is one of the most important in the English language. Its faults are diffuseness of style and complexity of general arrangement, and a competent editor would be able to condense it into one half the bulk without curtailing it of any important matter. It is nevertheless most

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The public which is already acquainted with Mr. Hamerton's great and peculiar merits as an art-critic will not be disappointed at finding that the present work is less a biography than a treatise on the aim, function, and limitation of pictorial art. It gives as complete an account of the great artist's life and career as the present very imperfect state of our knowledge of him permits; but Mr. Hamerton states at the very beginning that he has been "the more willing to write a biography of Turner that it is impossible to study him without encountering the greatest of all problems in artcriticism, the relation of Art to Nature." all landscape-painters Turner, says Mr. Hamerton, is at once the most comprehensive in his study of nature and the most independent of nature, the most observant of truth and also, in a certain sense, the most untrue. This double life of Turner, as observer and artist, compels us to distinguish between art and mere observation from the very beginning, under peril of falling into snares which the subject itself has laid for us. We must understand that Art and Nature are not the same world, but two worlds which only resemble each other, and have many things in common. Turner, with the instinct of genius, understood this from the first."

This passage furnishes the key-note to the entire book; Mr. Hamerton using Turner's pictures and method of work as a text from which to expound and enforce the doctrine that artlandscape art in common with all other forms

of it is not imitation of nature, but an ideal representation of such selected particulars as appeal to the artist's taste or fancy. This proposition is enlarged upon and emphasized in every possible way and with much ingenuity of illustration, and in grasping it with full and clear comprehension of its bearing and significance, the reader catches the principal purpose of the author in writing his very interesting and instructive book.

The volume is embellished with nine illustrations after Turner's sketches, etched by A. Brunet-Debaines.

WILD LIFE IN A SOUTHERN COUNTY. Boston: Roberts Bros.

The author of this book has been compared as to literary quality with White of Selbourne and old Izaak Walton, and certainly the resemblance is very noticeable. There is the same hearty, objective love of nature for its own sake, the same faculty of minute and exact observation, the same genius for details, and a similar power of picturesque and pleasing description. There is also that piquant flavor of an interesting and original personality behind the recorded observations which constitutes one of the principal charms of the older authors. Regarded merely as literature there are few things more delightful and appetizing, though there is a marked absence in the case of all three of the authors named of any straining after literary effect.

The author of "Wild Life" lives in an ancient farm-house situated at the verge of a small hamlet in one of the southern counties of England, and the area of his observations embraces only his farm, the hamlet, and the country immediately adjacent. That material of sufficient quantity to fill a volume could be found in such a limited area is in itself a surprising fact, even if we should make considerable allowance for "padding;" but the author has not only filled a volume without apparent effort, but has made it of fascinating interest from beginning to end. The forms and movements of clouds, the phenomena of rain and mists, the conformation of the country, the pathway of the brook from its spring on the hillside to the lakelet in the valley, the situation and characteristics of woods, the varied attractions of fruit-trees and flowers, and the teeming life of insects, birds, fishes, and such wild animals as are left in a long-settled country--all these in turn engage his attention, and there is no one of them about which he does not tell something at once fresh and interesting. No book with which we are acquainted conveys so impressively the oft-reiterated lesson that the things immediately about us possess an inexhaustible interest for the eye that

can really observe and the mind that can interpret them.

THE SECRET OF SUCCESS; OR, HOW TO GET ON IN THE WORLD. By W. H. Davenport Adams. American Edition, edited by P. G. H. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. The title of this book seems to promise something which its contents do not provide; but the author is careful at the very beginning cf his preface to acknowledge that he has no special secret to disclose, and that in point of fact, there is no royal road to success any more than there is to learning. The book would be much more accurately described if it were entitled "How to deserve Success," and it devotes quite as much space to impressing upon the reader the futility and mistake of what is ordinarily called success, and the necessity of distinguishing between true and false success, as to telling him how to get on in the world. The advice and the doctrine are for the most part sound and judicious, and far more likely to be really useful than any quack suggestions as to practical methods of success; but they have the disadvantage of being in the last degree hackneyed and commonplace. The attraction of the book, however, lies, not in its exhortations or its teachings but in the personal sketches and anecdotes with which these teachings are illustrated. Mr. Adams adroitly enforces his points by citing pertinent examples from the lives and achievements of successful men, and in gathering them he has industriously gleaned the records of both Eng

land and America. Merely for copiousness the collection of anecdotes would be remarkable, and they are told with the spirit and vigor and animation of a genuine raconteur.

FOREIGN LITERARY NOTES.

THE late William Howitt has left an autobiography which is almost sufficiently advanced for publication.

THE British Museum has lately acqured the remainder of the tablets found at Hillah; some of them are of great interest.

MR. SWINBURNE is giving much of his attention to studies of the Elizabethan 'drama and

Shakespearean literature. They will appear probably in the proposed Dramatic Dictionary. THE selection from the letters of Charles Dickens which Miss Hogarth and Miss Dick

ens are preparing was to have seen the light in the spring, but the publication of the work has been unavoidably delayed. We are, however, now in a position to state that the book will be out some time in the autumn-at any rate before Christmas.-Athenæum.

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MONSIGNOR ALFONSO CAPECELATRO has been appointed Prefect of the Vatican Library in the place of Cardinal Pecci, recently raised to the cardinalate by his brother the Pope. Monsignor Capecelatro belongs to a very distinguished Neapolitan family, is a man of great learning, and is well known as the author of the Storia di San Pier Damiano e del suo Tempo;" he has also published a work on Cardinal Newman. At the time of the last Council the new Prefect wrote a pamphlet, which, on account of its liberal views, was not approved of by the Curia; it is to be hoped that the same liberal tendency may be displayed in arrangements to make the literary treasures of the Vatican more accessible than has been the custom heretofore.

LORD JEFFREY had a very high opinion of Macaulay's essay on Frederick the Great. "I am not sure," he wrote to Mr. Napier, "whether I do not think it the very best thing Macaulay has yet written, and I am quite cer

tain that no other man alive (and I am half inclined to add that ever lived) could write any thing of the kind so well." Macaulay's opinion of Jeffrey's selected essays is given in Trevelyan's life of him, but as it was expressed in a private letter to Mr. Napier, it is worth quoting here with what Jeffrey says of Macaulay. "I think," he says, " that there are few things in the four volumes which one or two other men could not have done as well, but I do not think that any one man except Jeffrey, nay that any three men, could have produced such diversified excellence. When I compare him with Sydney and myself, I feel with humility, perfectly sincere that his range is immeasurably wider than ours, and this is only as a writer. But he is not only a writer, he has been a great advocate, and he is a great judge. Take him all in all, I think him more nearly an universal genius than any man of Certainly far more nearly than Brougham, much as Brougham affects the character. Brougham does one thing well, two or three things indifferently, and a hundred things detestably."

our time.

MESSRS. C. KEGAN PAUL AND Co. are preparing for publication a series of books which

will treat of the Principles, Methods, and History of Education, and will aim at affording trustworthy information with respect to the different systems of instruction adopted in Europe and America. While the area of subjects which this series is intended to cover will be sufficiently wide to give to it the completeness of a Cyclopædia of Education, each subject will be discussed with that reference to practical details which its relations to school management may require. In the composition of the several volumes, the requirements of teachers in secondary as well as primary schools will be carefully kept in view; and, while due attention will be given to the discussion of "Elementary Subjects," an attempt will be made to explain the best methods of teaching those branches of knowledge which are included in the curricula of higher classical and modern schools. The various volumes will be written by experienced teachers or by specialists who have devoted much time and study to the 'subjects of which they will treat, and the whole series will be under the editorial care of Mr. Philip Magnus.

SCIENCE AND ART.

THE CHEMICAL COMPOSITION OF SEA-Water.

-Jacobsen has set himself the task of deciding the question whether the composition of seawater taken from different seas and oceans, and different depths, possessed the same composition, and whether the discrepancies observed in analyses were due to errors of manipulation. For this purpose he examined the composition of forty-six specimens of seawater, collected on board the "Gazelle' during the expedition of 1874-1876, for every possible locality and depth. The constituents which were determined were chlorine, sulphuric acid, and calcium carbonate. The chlorine showed only a very slight variation; the salt corresponding to the chlorine amounted in the highest case to 1.8140, in the lowest case to 1.8047, the mean being 1.80936. The chlorine was determined in fifteen specimens. When it is remembered that these results are influenced by the unavoidable errors of chlorine determinations and the determination of salt, one will not be disposed to ascribe to the found irregular variations any significance of weight, but will not hesitate to say that the relative amounts of chlorine contained in oceanic waters show no considerable variation. The sulphuric acid was determined in 166 specimens of water. It constituted in the mean 6.493 per cent of the entire salt present; the greatest difference (0.35 per cent) lay between the maximum 6.69 per cent and the minimum

6.34 per cent. The author remarks that here again the variation would be less if the unavoidable error of the areometric determinaThere are tion of salt could be eliminated. grounds, however, for believing that the amount of sulphuric acid present in water is somewhat less constant than the amount of chlorine. On the other hand, attention must be directed to the fact that any regular variation in the properties of sulphuric acid, depending on the place or the depth from which the water has been taken, was not observed. The determinations of calcium carbonate were made in thirty-nine samples of water. The mean result was in 10,000 parts of water 0.269 parts of lime carbonate, the maximum being 0.312 parts, and the minimum 0.220 parts. So far from referring these variations in the results to differences in the sources whence the waters were taken, or regarding them as indications of any other change, the author ascribes them to errors of experiment which became the greater in these cases from the fact of his having a more limited quantity of water to work with (less than one litre) than is desirable for experiments of these kinds. The results are very accordant when compared with the hitherto published analyses. They support the view held by the author that the amount of lime carbonate present in sea-water shows but slight variation. His results do not accord with those of J. Davy, who believed that the open sea contained little or no lime carbonate. And we are, moreover, not driven to believe the views pronounced by Forchhammer, that the sea animals which have shells are able to convert the lime sulphate of sea-water into carbonate. The waters of different regions appear to mix very rapidly and readily.

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A NEW SCIENCE.-An Austrian professor has come forward as the discoverer of a new science. He has approached humanity with a measuring tape, and now publishes the results of his laborious investigations. All science is built up more or less on statistics, and Professor Weisbach has laid the foundation of what he himself calls 'Anterropometry." He has divided the human race into nineteen different peoples, and, collecting his inferences from a sufficient number of individuals, has published his knowledge in a tabulated form. The points which he has selected for illustrating his theories seem curiously chosen. The length of the body, the circumference of the head, the proportions of the nose, the relation of the arm as compared with other limbs, and the rapidity of pulsation are the chief centres of his system. For example, in the matter of rapidity of pulse he thus catalogues humanity. The dullest circulation seems to belong to the negroes of Congo, who have 62 pulsations in a minute.

After them come the Hottentots, with 64, the Kaffirs 70, the Northern Slavs 72, the Siamese 74, the Jews 77, the Sandwich Islanders 78, and the Nicobars 84. In matters of height the shortest people in the world-not being actually dwarfs are the Hottentots, the average height, in millimetres, being 1.287. Then follow the Japanese at 1.569, the Jews 1,599, the Australians 1.617, the Slavs 1.671, the Northern Chinese 1,675, the Kaffirs 1.753, and the Maoris 1.757. These figures may be instructively compared with recognized European altitudes, which the professor exhibits in a parallel column. The results are curious, and establish incontestably the superiority of northern races. The Norwegians are the tallest, but they are not as tall as the Maoris, the average heights being relatively 1.728 and 1.757. The Scotch come next at 1.708, then the Swedes, 1.700, then the English at 1.690, and next follow the Danes 1.685, the Germans 1.680, the French 1.667, the Italians and the Portuguese. It is found that largeness of head is generally in inverse ratio to length of body; not that tall men have little heads so much as that tall races have small heads, the only exceptions being the Patagonians, whose great height is not deformed by insignificant brain. The variations of nose are more remarkable than those of any other organ which the 'professor has measured. The Jews and the Patagonians head the list, the average in millimetres being 71; the nearest are the Maoris at 52, and the farthest the Australians at 30, while in breadth of nostril the list must be read upside down; it commences with the Australians at 52, and ends with the Jews at 34. For torso and breadth of chest the American Indians surpass all other people, while it is recorded of the Africans, and especially of the Congo negroes, that the relative proportion between length of arm and length of leg is in their case completely inverted.-Globe.

THE HEAT OF THE SUN.-The Journal of the Royal Geological Society of Ireland, for 1877-8, contains a remarkable paper, by the Rev. Samuel Haughton, "On the Total Annual Heat received at each Point of the Earth's Surface from the Sun," etc. The Sun's annual heat is computed as equivalent to the melting of 80 feet of ice. It is not easy in a short paragraph, says the Athenæum, to give the results of an elaborate mathematical examination, but it is determined that the work done in melting I cubic foot of ice would suffice to crush into powder 4 cubic feet of rock," which is equal to the geological work done in 3090 years; and it is inferred that one foot of ice (representing sun heat) would account for the present geological work for 12,360 years."

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QUEEN-BEES.—In a paper read to the Quekett Microscopical Club at a recent meeting, Mr. J. Hunter states that a fertile queen-bee will in four years lay a million eggs. Twenty-one days are required for the production of a worker-bee; but the same egg that produced the worker in twenty-one days could, had the bees been so minded, have been bred up to a queen in sixteen days. The bees," continues Mr. Hunter, "only rear queens when necessity calls for them, either from loss of their old monarch or apprehended swarming. If I remove the queen from a hive, the first of these contingencies occurs, and after a few hours' commotion, the bees select certain of the worker-eggs, or even young larvæ two or three days old. The cell is enlarged to five or six times its ordinary capacity; a sup erabundance of totally different food is supplied; and the result is that, in five days less than would have been required for a worker, a queen is hatched. The marvel is inexplicable. How a mere change and greater abundance of food and a more roomy lodging, should so transform the internal and external organs of any living creature! The case is without a parallel in all the animal creation. It is not a mere superficial change that has been effected; but one that penetrates far below form and structure, to the very fountain of life itself. It is a transformation alike of function, of structure, and of instinct."

A CHINESE TILE FACTORY.-A correspondent of The London Builder in a recent account of his visit to one of the mining districts of China, thus describes the Imperial tile manufactory at Lien li ku, about fifteen miles west of Pekin:

"In this factory all the yellow tiles and bricks required for Imperial buildings are made, as also large numbers of green, blue, and other colored tiles for various ornamental purposes. The material used is a hard blue shale, nearly as hard as slate. This is allowed to lie in heaps for some time. It is then ground to powder by granite rollers, on a stone floor thirty to forty feet in diameter. The powder is then stored in heaps and taken to the works as required. For ordinary work the powder is mixed with a proper proportion of water and moulded into large bricks, which are laid out to dry for some hours, after which they are dealt with by the modellers. When bricks are to have a moulding on them, say for coping a wall, the plan of operation is as follows: Two pieces of wood, each cut to the shape of the moulding, are placed upright on a slab. The clay brick is placed between them, and two men run the mouldings roughly along with chisels. They then apply straight edges to test the accuracy of their work, and finally rub the edges with moulds somewhat in the

same way as plasterers make mouldings at home. The brick is then passed to a third man, who cuts any necessary holes in it, and to a fourth, who trims it off and repairs any defect. The more ornamental tiles and bricks, representing fabulous animals, etc., are first roughly moulded, and afterwards finished off with tools exactly similar to those used for modelling in clay in Europe. Some of this work has some pretension to artistic merit. All the bricks and tiles are baked in ovens, and then, after having the glaze put on, are baked a second time. All the work done at this manufactory appears to be first-rate, and the number of people employed when they are busy in about 500.

RE-PLANTING TEETH.-Can teeth be transplanted? If recent accounts of operations by dentists are trustworthy, the answer must be in the affirmative. But the question has been formally discussed at a meeting of the Odontological Society, and from this we learn that it was in replanting (which is not the same thing as transplanting), that the foreign dentists, whose names had been cited, achieved their success. Among them, a Frenchman, Dr. Magitot, has published full particulars of cases in which diseased teeth were taken out, and the root or a portion of periosteum was cut away, and then were replanted in the same socket, where, after a few days or weeks, they became firm and serviceable. Out of sixty-three operations in four years, five were failures; but some of the cures were painful and tedious, owing to local discharge. In technical phraseology, Dr. Magitot holds "the indications for an operation to be the existence of chronic periostitis of the apex of the root, its denudation, and absorption of its surface. . . .The resection of this, which plays the part of irritant, is the essential aim of the operation. And the extraction having been performed with due care, if no other lesion be detected save the alteration in the apex of the root, the tooth is to be replaced as soon as this has been excised and smoothed, and the hemorrhage has ceased."

A NEW FORCE.-For a long time past, as some of our readers may have heard, there has been great talk about a new "motor" which is alleged to have been discovered by a man named Keely, living in Philadelphia. Originally, we believe, Mr. Keely promised to enable the largest steamship to cross the Atlantic with no greater motive power than could be supplied by a bucket of water-no coals, no furnaces, no fire of any kind would be required. This seems a romance, but there was something more than imagination in it. Mr. Keely unquestionably managed to set very power

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ful machinery in motion, at his workship in Philadelphia, without the employment of any of the usual forces, and the experiments were watched by many practical men-among others, as we remember, by the managers of two or three of the great steamship lines. What was his secret? Some said electricity, others compressed air. There were many who did not hesitate to assert that the whole affair was a fraud." For months together nothing more was heard of it. At last we learn from the New York World that the invention, whatever it may be, is very near completion. A correspondent, who has recently seen the machine at work, confirms our own recollection of it, namely, that the only motive power visible is contained in a glass of water. With this Mr. Keely can produce a pressure of 20,000 lbs. to the square inch. We do not profess to explain it, nor are we even prepared to avow entire faith in it. We only know that the force is there, and that the machinery set in motion by it was built by some of the best known firms in the United States. If there is any imposture in the experiments, no one has yet been able to trace it. The Week.

THE WRITING TELEGRAPH.-Among recent inventions, the Writing Telegraph is remarkable for the combination of philosophical principles and ingenious mechanical devices by which its inventor, Mr. E. A. Cowper, can excite a pen thirty miles distant, or more, from his hand to write in distinct and legible characters the message which he wishes to communicate. The sending instrument, at the hither end of the line wire is provided with a coiled band of paper. which uncoils (by mechanism) as the operator writes his message with a vertical pencil. To this pencil are jointed "contact rods," which, as their name indicates, play an important part in the reproduction of the message at the farther end, where a glass pen moving up or down, backward or forward, in exact obedience to the hand of the distant sender, records it in ink, also on a revolving band of paper. So sensitive is the mechanism, that differences of handwriting are immediately shown as dffierent persons manipulate the pencil. In consequence of the continual uncoiling of the paper, new beginners find it difficult to avoid leaving gaps in their a's, o's, and m's; but this is soon overcome by practice, and the words as they pass from under the mysteriously moving pen appear clear, bold, and unbroken. The result is so complete, that the instrument is, so to speak, invested with a charm which inspires an onlooker with surprise and admiration.

The importance of this invention must be our excuse for thus again referring to it in these columns.

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