nursery.
Yet it may be that they "pay" in the end. Nay, as the cradle may enrich
the household through the new incentives to labor and frugality which it
supplies, so protections of industry may evoke new industrial powers,
and thus at once begin to enrich the _nation_, though the capital which
supports these fresh industries could not at first hold its own, as
against other capital, without the motherly cares it receives.

But enough. Here is a book on a matter of large and immediate
importance, put forth by one of the amplest and soundest minds of our
time,--a man so long-headed and clear-hearted, so able and intrepid to
think, to speak, and to hear correction, so intent upon high ends and so
calmly patient upon the way, that the public can neglect his thought
only by a criminal neglect of its own interests.

_A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life. With a Complete
Bibliography of the Subject._ By WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER.
Philadelphia: Geo. W. Childs.

Few "signs of the times" are more significant than the disposition shown
on all sides to scrutinize and interpret the spiritual history of
mankind. Lessing, Schlegel, Herder, Hegel, Guizot, Buckle, and others,
endeavor, with various degrees of ambition and success, to estimate
history considered as a progress; Carlyle in his "Heroes" and Emerson in
the "Representative Men" regard it rather as a permanence, and seek to
present its value in typical forms; meanwhile the Bibles and mythologies
of the old world are collected, translated, subjected to interpretative
study; and the critical scholarship of our time is almost wholly engaged
in an endeavor either to arrive at the exact text or at the precise
value of all the ancient literatures.

All men have at length discovered that the history of mankind _means_
something, and are naturally intent on learning _what_ it means. No one
now regards it as a mere Devil's phantasmagoria, significant of nothing
but Adam's sin in the Garden. However differing on other points, we all
now perceive that the history of the mind of man is a more interior
history of the universe,--that it must be studied, in the most earnest
and reverential spirit of science,--that what Astronomy seeks to do in
the heavens and Geology on the earth must be done in the realms of the
mind itself,--and that, till we have found our Copernicus and our Newton
of the human soul, modern science lingers in the porch, and does not
find access to th