it is a little heavier. It is evident that the substance
of which this book is composed cannot be India-rubber in its natural
state. Those leaves, thinner than paper, can be stretched only by a
strong pull, and resume their shape perfectly when they are let go.
There is no smell of India-rubber about them. We first saw this book
in a cold room in January, but the leaves were then as flexible as old
paper; and when, since, we have handled it in warm weather, they had
grown no softer.

Some of our readers may have heard Daniel Webster relate the story of
the India-rubber cloak and hat which one of his New York friends sent
him at Marshfield in the infancy of the manufacture. He took the cloak
to the piazza one cold morning, when it instantly became as rigid as
sheet-iron. Finding that it stood alone, he placed the hat upon it,
and left the articles standing near the front door. Several of his
neighbors who passed, seeing a dark and portly figure there, took it
for the lord of the mansion, and gave it respectful salutation. The
same articles were liable to an objection still more serious. In the
sun, even in cool weather, they became sticky, while on a hot day they
would melt entirely away to the consistency of molasses. Every one
remembers the thick and ill-shaped India-rubber shoes of twenty years
ago, which had to be thawed out under the stove before they could be
put on, and which, if left under the stove too long, would dissolve
into gum that no household art could ever harden again. Some decorous
gentlemen among us can also remember that, in the nocturnal combats of
their college days, a flinty India-rubber shoe, in cold weather, was a
missive weapon of a highly effective character.

This curious volume, therefore, cannot be made of the unmanageable
stuff which Daniel Webster set up at his front door. So much is
evident at a glance. But the book itself tells us that it can be
subjected, without injury, to tests more severe than summer's sun and
winter's cold. It can be soaked six months in a pail of water, and
still be as good a book as ever. It can be boiled; it can be baked in
an oven hot enough to cook a turkey; it can be soaked in brine, lye,
camphene, turpentine, or oil; it can be dipped into oil of vitriol,
and still no harm done. To crown its merits, no rat, mouse, worm, or
moth has ever shown the slightest inclination to make acquaintance
with it. The office of a Review is not usually provided with the means