d skilled authority to
rule the bank is the principal novelty suggested; but the French plan
will not do for England. The direct appointment of a governor by the
Crown would not lessen the difficulty. The American law, saying that
each national bank shall have a fixed proportion of cash to its
liabilities, Mr. Bagehot considers one of many reforms which the English
could not adopt if they would: "in a sensitive state of the British
money-market the near approach to the legal limit of reserve would be a
sure incentive to panic." The difficulties of remodeling such an
institution as the Bank of England are the most curiously developed
portion of Mr. Bagehot's treatise, where all is curiously and
intelligently handled. The book is interesting to outsiders as well as
to professionals.

Wau-Ban: The Early Day in the North-west. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott
& Co.

This is a reprint, in a condensed and convenient form, of a work written
some twenty years ago by Mrs. John H. Kinzie of Chicago. It is a real
contribution to the early history of the North-west, and contains enough
of romantic adventure to form the basis of half a dozen novels. The
story of the massacre of Chicago in 1812 is one of the most thrilling in
American history, and it is here told by an eye-witness. Still, it is
difficult to realize that sixty years ago a wagon-load of children were
tomahawked by Indians in what is now the heart of the great City of the
Lakes.

The family of Kinzie had certainly a remarkable history, beginning with
the female ancestor who was captured by savages in the early history of
the country, through that generation who were the founders of Chicago,
down to the living representative of the family, who in 1830 entered one
hundred and sixty acres of the present town at the government price, one
dollar and twenty-five cents per acre, and only paid for one hundred,
thinking, as he said, that that quantity of land would be all he should
ever want or could find a use for. The rejected portion is now worth
from two to three millions of dollars. A hundred years hence, when
Chicago will perhaps contain a million or two of inhabitants, the name
of this family of pioneers will be as memorable as that of Winthrop in
Boston or Stuyvesant in New York.

_Books Received._

De Witt's Acting Plays: No. 142. Dollars and Cents: A Comedy. By L. J.
Hollenius.--No. 145. First Love: A Comedy. From the French of Eugene
Scribe. By L. J. Ho