exhaustive examination than we have here been enabled to bestow
upon it.

_Strategy and Tactics_. By General G.H. DUFOUR, lately an Officer of the
French Engineer Corps, Graduate of the Polytechnic School, and Commander
of the Legion of Honor; Chief of Staff of the Swiss Army. Translated
from the latest French Edition, by WILLIAM R. CRAIGHILL, Captain U.S.
Engineers, lately Assistant Professor of Civil and Military Engineering
and Science of War at the U.S. Military Academy. New York: D. Van
Nostrand.

The author of this work is a distinguished civil and military engineer
and practical soldier, who, in all military matters, is recognized as
one of the first authorities in Europe. His history is especially
interesting to Americans, since not many years ago he played a prominent
part in the suppression of a rebellion which, in many features,
exhibited a remarkable similarity to the one with which our own
Government is contending. We refer to the secession of the seven Swiss
cantons forming the Sonderbund, which, like the insurrection of the
Southern States, was a revolt of reactionary against liberal principles
of government; it was likewise the fruit of a well-organized and
long-matured conspiracy, which only delayed an open outbreak until all
its preparations were adequately perfected for a formidable resistance.
The issue of the contest was what we may hope will be that of our
own,--the triumph of free principles, and the complete reestablishment
of the authority of the legitimate Government on a firmer basis than it
had before occupied.

General Dufour was born at Constance, of a family of Genevese origin.
Having acquired his early education at Geneva, where he devoted his
attention chiefly to mathematics, he entered the Polytechnic School at
Paris, was commissioned two years afterwards in the corps of Engineers,
and served in the later campaigns of Napoleon, where he rose to the rank
of captain. He afterwards entered the Swiss Federal service, in which he
became colonel, chief of the general staff, and quartermaster-general.
At later periods he has held the less active, but equally responsible
and honorable positions of superintendent of the triangulation of
Switzerland on which the topographical map of the country is based, and
chief instructor of engineering in the principal military school of the
Republic, at Thun.

When, in 1847, the Swiss Diet determined to dissolve the Sonderbund,
which had at length co