1. _Kraft und Stoff_. By G. BUeCHNER. Fourth edition. 1857.

2. _Materie und Geist_. By the same. 1857.

It is certainly a remarkable sign of the times, that a book treating
of purely scientific matters,--physiological facts and ideas,--like
the first of these, of which the second is the complement, should in a
very few years have attained to its fourth edition in Germany. All
those works on Natural Science, by Alexander von Humboldt, Oersted, Du
Bois-Raymond, Cotta, Vogt, Moleschott, Buechner, Rossmaessler, Ule,
Mueller, and others, which have appeared since the Revolution of 1848,
uniting a more popular and intelligible style with a purely scientific
treatment of the matter-of-fact, irrespective of the religious and
political dogmas that conflict with the results of natural science,
have met with decided success in Germany and France. They are
extensively read and appreciated, even by the less educated and
learned classes. Among these works, that of Buechner ranks high, and
it is therefore strange that we have seen it hitherto reviewed in no
American journal. This may serve us as an excuse for noticing this
fourth edition, though it is little improved over the former ones. It
exhibits the last results of the science of physiology, in a
scientific, but rather popular method of exposition. There is quite a
hive of new ideas and intuitions contained in it,--ideas conflicting,
it is true, with many received dogmas, and irreconcilable with
orthodoxy; but it is of no use to shut our eyes to these ideas, as
though the danger threatening from this side could be averted by
imitating the policy of the ostrich. They should be faced and
examined; the danger is far greater from ignoring them. It is
impossible that ideas, largely entertained and cultivated by a nation
so expert in thinking, so versed in science and literature as the
Germans, should have no interest for the great, intelligent American
public. Natural Science may be said to form, at present, an integral
portion of the religion of the Germans. It is, at least, a matter of
ethnological and historical interest to learn in what regions of
thought and speculation our German contemporaries are at home, and
wherein they find their mental happiness and delight.

_Die deutsche komische und humoristische Dichtung seit Beginn des
16. Jahrhunderts bis auf unsere Zeit_. Von IGNAZ HUB. Nuernberg:
Ebner. 1857.

Two volumes of this interesting work are coming out at the same