IS LIFE WORTH LIVING? By William Hurrell Mallock. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

The subject discussed by Mr. Mallock in this book is not the rather puerile question contained in its title, but the much more significant and important one, Can life, on Positivist principles, be rationally thought worth living?" (By Positivism, it may be well to explain, Mr. Mallock does not mean the system of Comte or his disciples, but the common principles on which the whole scientific school agree.) As thus amended this question is undoubtedly one of the most important that can claim the attention of thinkers in our day, and it is equally undoubed that Mr. Mallock discusses it in a very trenchant and effective manner. The peculiar force of Mr. Mallock's method of treatment lies in this, that although he is arguing for Theism as against materialistic interpretations of nature, he yet waives entirely the à priori assumptions from which Theists usually start, and accepts as the very basis of his argument the principles and method of the most advanced scientific school. Using precisely the same logic with which science professes to have crumbled down the citadel of faith, he undermines and riddles the fundamental propositions of Science itself; and completely demonstrates, we think, that on grounds of pure reason the conceptions of Theism are just as plausible, just as probable, and just as susceptible of defence as those which are considered by scientists to be almost beyond the reach of discussion. Going still further, he points out (and this is the most striking portion of his book) that if science be correct in its denial of the fundamental propositions of Theism, then there is nothing in human life to justify the grandiloquent language in which scientists are accustomed to speak of its sacredness and the dignity of its aims. If, he argues, all the phenomena of human life find their origin and end in man as we know him, then the distinctions between right and wrong, truth and falsehood, virtue and vice, are too flimsy to trouble the thoughts of any one, and the exaltation of phrase with which Positivists often refer to life is unconsciously borrowed from a period when man, through a religious creed, "took hold upon eternal verities."

This proposition is argued by Mr. Mallock from several different premisses (adjusting themselves to the various phases of Positive theory), and not only with great power of logic but with masterful literary skill. Had he stopped when he had finished dealing with it, his book would have been a most influential contribution to the thought of the day; but in

three chapters superfluously tacked on to the main theme he accomplishes something very closely resembling self-stultification. In these chapters, assuming that he has demonstrated the need of a theology to make life worth living, he attempts to show that Roman Catholicism is the only possible theology. This, at best, would seem an impotent conclusion to such a discussion, but the line of argument by which it is reached is so extremely feeble and fantastic as to make the reader feel that after all the force of the author's previous logic must have been overrated. Nevertheless, the book, as a whole, is a very remarkable one.

MODERN CHROMATICS, WITH APPLICATIONS TO ART AND INDUSTRY. By Professor Ogden N. Rood. International Scientific Series. Vol. XXVI. New York: D. Appleton & Co. COLOR-BLINDNESS: ITS DANGERS AND ITS DETECTION. By B. Joy Jeffries, A.M., M.D. Boston: Houghton, Osgood & Co.

Though entirely dissimilar in scope and method of treatment, these two book may be coupled together as dealing with the same general subject and in a sense complementary to each other. Professor Rood discusses the principles and laws of color in all their bearings, and bestows particular attention upon their practical application to the art of painting. This latter feature of his work constitutes its only claim to novelty. The theory of color which the author adopts is that commonly known as the Young-Helmholtz theory, and though his exposition of it is remarkably lumi. nous and skilful, it is of course already more or less familiar to students of science. But Professor Rood is something more than a savant, and is keenly alive to the poetical or picturesque side of his subject. Having practised painting himself and enjoyed for many years the advantage of intimate intercourse with artists, his treatise is much more than a simple exposition of scientific principles; and it may be said to furnish to the artist or amateur all that he will need to know of the science of color, and to the scientific student an insight into those higher applications which make the subject of color so fascinating. The book is copiously and handsomely illustrated.

Dr. Jeffries also adopts and expounds the Young-Helmholtz theory of color, but this is only preliminary to the exhaustive discussion of a branch of the subject which Professor Rood barely touches upon, namely, ColorBlindness. Dr. Jeffries' work is avowedly based upon Professor Holmgren's "ColorBlindness and its Relations to Railroads and

the Marine," which was published at Upsala, Sweden, in 1877, and which he declares to be an epoch-making work." It was the Doctor's original intention merely to translate that work into English, but he was partially anticipated in that design by the Smithsonian Institution, which included a slightly abridged translation of it in its Annual Report for 1877. In his present work, however, Dr. Jeffries includes a good part of Professor Holmgren's book," summarises the work of earlier and later observers in the same field, and gives the results of over ten thousand testings for colorblindness, made by himself according to Holmgren's method among New England teachers and students.

The investigations thus far made in France and Sweden and in this country appear to prove that about five persons in every hundred are color-blind, the proportion being much greater among males than among females. The most frequent forms of color-blindness are those of insensibility to red or green-violetblindness being much more rare. From the well-known case of Dalton, color-blindness was formerly called "Daltonism," but that term must be abandoned now that it has been discovered that his special defect (red-blindness) is not the only form of defective vision.

It is to the practical aspects of his subject that Dr. Jeffries chiefly devotes his attention, and he urges with much emphasis that the first use made of the knowledge already gained should be the elimination of color-blind persons from the railway and marine services. He thinks that many a hitherto mysterious accident at sea and on railways may be explained by the theory of defective vision on the part of some employee placed in a position of responsibility, and points out that should a railway accident in the future be traced to such a source (as can now be easily done), the company could not escape liability on the ground of non-preventible causes. A curious feature of color-blindness is that those in whom it is present are usually quite unconscious of it, and its detection has hitherto been a matter of accident, while its meaning has hardly been understood at all. Professors Holmgren's test-method is extremely simple in principle, and Dr. Jeffries describes it with such minuteness of detail that almost any one may apply it by providing himself with the requisite assortment of colored worsteds.

CESAR. A Sketch. By James Anthony Froude, M.A. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

skill, given freshness and fascinating interest to a narrative which is probably as familiar to most readers as any in the annals of literature. He does not accomplish this by any new discoveries of material; on the contrary, he rejects much that has hitherto been accepted as furnishing authentic data for Cæsar's life; but by marshalling the old and well-known facts in new combinations he presents a picture which as a whole gives one the impression of complete novelty. For one thing, the view-point from which Cæsar is usually regarded is entirely shifted in the present work. In most histories and biographies Cæsar is represented as the destroyer of the Roman Republic, as a ruthless military despot, as a man dominated from the very beginning by a selfish ambition: Mr. Froude depicts him as a reformer and not a revolutionist, as a sincere patriot, and as the preserver of the essential liberties of his countrymen against a corrupt aristocracy on the one hand and an anarchic mob on the other. Had he lived, so Mr. Froude thinks, he would have given a new lease of life to the ancient institutions of his country, and his murder "gave the last and necessary impulse to the closing act of the revolution."

Of course from this point of view Brutus and Cassius and their associates cease to be avenging patriots, and become a vulgar and nefarious band of conspirators, and indeed there is a complete transformation of the dramatis persona who figured upon the great stage of the world at that period. Marius is vindicated at the expense of Sylla; Pompey degenerates until in the contest between them it is he and not Cæsar who is actuated by selfish ambition; Cato is an impracticable fanatic who did his country more harm than good; and even Cicero, whose verdicts about his contemporaries have remained almost undisputed, is shown to have been a time-serving egotist, destitute of political principle, and always with his chief attention directed to his own interests. To exalt Cæsar is necessarily to depreciate his antagonists and detractors, and Mr. Froude performs his task in no half-hearted way.

The book is even more a history than a biography, and it gives a most vivid and instructive picture of the Roman world at an epoch which was one of the most critical in the annals of mankind.

MAID, WIFE, OR WIDOW? By Mrs. Alexander. Leisure Hour Series. New York: Henry Holt & Co.

We are sorry to say that this story is quite beneath the level of Mrs. Alexander's best work. The author has never equalled her admirable first story ("The Wooing O't"), but her fault has hitherto been rather on the side of profuseness and over-elaboration than of mea

greness of material. The latter, however, is distinctly the defect of “Maid, Wife, or Widow?" which, with a conception that might have been worked out very charmingly in the dimensions of an ordinary magazine story, is spun out into an independent volume. There is some skilful character-drawing in the story, and at least one very attractive woman, but somehow the reader does not get into close sympathy with it, and, short as it is, will be apt to feel that it is too long.

FOREIGN LITERARY NOTES.

THE Belgian Literary Union has resolved to organize an International Literary Congress, to be held in Brussels next year.

THE French papers state that Count Charles Walewski, son of the Minister of Napoleon III., is engaged on the publication of his father's memoirs.

PROF. LANZONE, of Turin, is preparing a work on Egyptian mythology, and another on the papyri representing the passage of the sun through the hours of the night.

MDLLE. A. TCHERNOFF is engaged on a translation into Russian of Prof. Dowden's "Shakespeare, his Mind and Art," which will be published at St. Petersburg in the autumn of this year.

THE historian Gregorovius is now engaged on a Life of Pope Urban VIII., and has collected many important documents elucidating the policy pursued by that pontiff during the Thirty Years' War.

DR. ARVID AHNFELT, the well-known Swedish bibliographer, has just completed a biographical and critical memoir of Leonhard Fredrik Rääf, the antiquary, who died in 1872, in his eighty-sixth year. The volume contains a great deal of new matter regarding Swedish literature in the first half of the present century.

MR. ALDIS WRIGHT has just finished his edition of Coriolanus for his "School Series of Shakespeare's Plays" for the Clarendon Press. The difficulties in the play have forced him to annotate it more freely than any previous play of the series, and its price will therefore be slightly higher.

A MOVEMENT is in progress for establishing a Society of English Literature, which is designed to occupy the place in this country which is occupied by the Société des Gens de Letters in France, and by similar bodies in Austria, Belgium, and Germany. This project is an outcome of the recent meetings of the International Literary Congress.

A FRENCH Society has been formed to promote the study of the history of French Protestantism, and proposes to issue a series of books on this subject under the collective title of "Classiques de Protestantisme." The first of these will be L'histoire des églises reformées du royaume de France attributed to the Reformer Théodore de Bayle, edited by Prof. Baum.

A PUBLISHING company of Turin, L'Unione tipografico-editrice, has issued the last number of a complete dictionary of the Italian language commenced seventeen years ago by the late Abate Tommaseo, and Profs. Meini, Bellini, etc. Since Tommaseo's death, in 1874, Prof. Meini has carried on the work alone, and the last thirty numbers, index of quotations, and preface, are all from his pen.

THE Russian Academy is just now printing a work by a young Orientalist, M. Sabinin, entitled "Records of the Georgian Church and Kingdom." It will contain a series of valuable historical documents in the Georgian language hitherto unpublished, and the text will be illustrated by portraits. M. Sabinin also intends adding a Russian translation. In the opinion of specialists this work promises to throw a new light on the obscure and intricate facts of Georgian history.

MESSRS. TRÜBNER, of Strasbourg, are publishing, for the Society for the Preservation of the Historical Monuments of Alsace, a reproduction, so far as existing materials allow, of

the Hortus deliciarum of the Abbess Herrad von Landsperg, destroyed during the bombardment of Strasbourg on the night of August 24-25, 1870. The Hortus, dedicated by Herrad to the nuns of Hohenburg, was an extensive compilation, composed of quotations from the Scriptures, from the Fathers, from sacred and profane historians, etc. The MS. was ornamented with miniatures, forming a most valuable picture-gallery of the twelfth century.

WE learn from a recent Report that the system of libraries attached to the primary schools in Paris shows satisfactory progress. The number of these libraries now amounts to 440, with a total of 44, 120 volumes. During the past year 100,482 books were lent out. Originally established in 1862, the enterprise encountered not a little opposition both from the religious institutions and the general body of teachers, who seem to have feared that the pupils would prefer discursive reading to their regular studies. But since 1872 things have gone more smoothly. No attempt is made to select what we should call "improving" literature. At first the novels of Mayne Reid," Paul and Virginia" and "Robinson" were the most sought after. The classical works of the great French dramatists are now rising in popularity,

and also the scientific medleys of Jules Verne. The national romances of Erckmann-Chatrian are the rage among boys, while girls prefer La Case de l'Oncle Tom.

SCIENCE AND ART.

HEART AND BRAIN.-At the fifty-first meeting of German Naturalists, in Cassel, Dr. Wiedemeister made some remarks on the connection between heart-disease and mental diseases. Practitioners who are not exclusively psychologists are much inclined to consider cardiac affections as one of the causes of madness, while psychologists are of a totally different opinion. If his memory did not fail him, Bazin had found in making post mortem examinations of lunatics that in I per cent of the cases there was disease of the heart. Witkowsky had found this in more than 7 per cent, and Karrer, of Erlangen, in 30 per cent. Wishing to find some more definite numbers, he had for some years past carefully measured the hearts of lunatics, especially the left ventricle, and had found that in 75 per cent of the cases there was thickening of the wall of the left ventricle, and that the latter was hypertrophic.-British Medical Journal.

A TELL-TALE COMPASS.-Mr. Henry A. Severn, of Herne Hill, has invented a very clever little instrument, called a tell-tale compass, by which the captain or master of a ship, when down in his cabin, may know whether or not the ship is sailing her course, or is wander

ing from it. He uses the constant position of the compass-card and the varying one of the ship so as to produce an electric contact, which rings a bell in case the angle made by the line of actual progress with the course to be steered exceeds a certain deviation on either side; and he proposes that the bell rung in case of deviation on one side shall be different in tone from that rung in case of deviation on the other side. His invention is a veritable symbol of the chief inventions of the age, which are always employed in superseding the responsibilities of individual watchfulness, by mechanical warnings that allow of intermittent zeal. Even in matters of pure conscience we are very apt to prefer to trust to the sudden warning that some electric contact with social feeling is suddenly joined or interrupted, rather than exact from ourselves a rigid and vigilant scrutiny of our own course. A kind

of social alarum is the fashionable conscience of the age.-Spectator.

SUNSPOTS AND RAINFALL.-In a pamphlet of thirty-four pages, which has been prepared by Messrs. Lockyer, Hunter, and Archibald

for submission to the Indian Famine Commission, and is published by Messrs. Macmillan, we have a carefully-drawn-up digest of the evidence for the existence of a sunspot periodicity in cosmical phenomena. The authors have put together the evidence of such periodicity in Magnetic Declination, in Auroras, in the number of Cyclones, in the area of Cyclones, in Wrecks from Lloyd's books, and in Rainfall, and they express their conviction that, notwithstanding many apparent anomalies and a large area of unexplained facts, the evidence suffices to establish the existence of a common

cycle, but they do admit that the time for safe prediction has not yet come. The pamphlet is very useful for those who wish to see all that can be said in favor of the theory.

RESEARCHES IN MAGNETIZATION. — It is known that in making permanent magnets the steel is first hardened and then magnetized, because, though in hard steel the temporary magnetism is somewhat less, its fixation is more certain. After it was proved that where steel is heated to a dark red the temporary magnetism it increases, the idea naturally arose that very may acquire continuously powerful permanent magnets might be got by magnetizing during the very process of hardening. Experiments have repeatedly been made in this direction, but they have been hardly decisive, and lately Herr Holtz has investigated the matter more thoroughly. His method was to get two steel bars as similar as possible, heat them to a bright red glow, then quench one of them directly, and the other after, and while a magnetizing force acted on it. This magnetizing force was provided in two ways— viz., either from an electro-magnet or from a magnetizing coil (which was suitably protected from the water). The first quenched bar was then subjected to the same magnetizing force, and the magnetism of the two bars was then measured by the method of oscillations. Some 500 magnetizations were thus performed on 170 bars; and the general result is that magnetization during hardening gives superior results only conditionally. The advantage of it decreases with increasing strength of the magnetizing force and thickness of bar. The method may give magnets six times as strong as those got by the ordinary method, but this only with an extremely weak magnetizing force. With a force from three Grove elements through a coil of 600 turns, and a bar 6 mm. thick, the advantage was already on the side of the old method. Herr Holtz concludes that magnetization during hardening offers no real advantage in practice. From experiments lately made by M. Jamin, it appears that a given current sent through a coil communicates to a bar within the coil much less magnetism when