ision of execution should always be
the result of complete knowledge of the thing to be drawn; if from any
other source, it will assuredly be only heedless scrawling, bad in
proportion as it is energetic and decided.

The chapter on Perspective is full and well illustrated, and useful to
architectural or mechanical draughtsmen, may-be, but little so to artists.
There are, indeed, no laws of perspective which the careful draughtsman
from Nature need ever apply, for his eye will show him the tendency of
lines and the relative magnitude of bodies quicker than he can find them
by the application of the rules of perspective,--and with much better
result, since all application of science _directly_ to artistic work
endangers its poetic character, and almost invariably gives rise to a
hardness and formalism the reverse of artistic, leading the artist to
depend on what he knows ought to be rather than on what he really sees, a
tendency more to be deprecated than any want of correctness in drawing.

The book contains chapters on artistic processes and technical matters
generally, making it a useful hand-book to amateurs; but all that is
really valuable to a young student of Art might be compressed into a very
few pages of this ponderous book. To follow its prescriptions _seriatim_
would be to him a serious loss of time and heart.

_The New American Cyclopaedia_. A Popular Dictionary of General Knowledge,
Edited by GEORGE RIPLEY and CHAS. A. DANA. Vol. II. New York: D. Appleton
& Co. 8vo.

We have spoken so fully of the purpose and general character of this work,
in noticing the first volume, that it is hardly necessary for us to speak
at length of the second. In a rapid glance at its contents, it appears
fully to bear out the promise of the first. We have noticed a few
omissions, and some mistakes of judgment. It is, perhaps, impossible to
preserve the gradation of reputations in such a work; but a zoologist must
be puzzled when he sees Von Baer, the great embryologist, who made a
classification of animals, founded on their development, which
substantially agrees with that of Cuvier, founded on their structure,
occupy about one tenth of the space devoted to Peter T. Barnum; however,
we suppose, that, as Barnum created new animals, he is a more wonderful
personage than Von Baer, who simply classified old ones. These occasional
omissions and disturbances of the scale of reputations are, however, more
than offset by the new in