pplication of them. Many very able men who have preceded him
in scientific labor, and who do not believe that "the bowels will be
aroused into animation" by the exhibition of "a small strip of yellow
glass three inches in depth, bordered by its affinitive violet," to the
umbilical region, or that "Major Buckley developed one hundred and
forty-eight persons so that they could read sentences shut up in boxes
or nuts," would listen attentively to what he has to say on the anatomy
of an atom, metachronism and "chromatic attraction."

Around the World in the Yacht Sunbeam. By Mrs. Brassey. New York: Henry
Holt & Co.

Some of the best books of travel we have had lately have been written by
women. Their way of looking at new things, even if superficial--which is
not by any means always a safe assumption--is pleasant and refreshing
after the more sober, philosophic and blue-booky style of comment we are
accustomed to be favored with by observers of the other sex. Many
valuable trivialities are lost by the effort to go deeper than the
surface. The phases of life, manners and scenery which strike one in a
rapid tour are perhaps most instructive, and certainly most
entertaining, when reproduced just as they appear. The light female
touch, which revolts at figures and documents, is well suited to that
work, if work it can be called. The male traveller, we know, does much
of his research when he gets home, keeping up, however, with a view to
that end, a solemnly didactic frame of mind all the time he is abroad.
He is thus apt to give us less of what he sees than of what he
thinks--an error into which a woman is less prone to fall. She is less
critical, less ashamed of being startled and pleased, and more frank and
naive in her confession of it. She resembles in this respect the
delightful voyagers of the Middle Ages--the Polos, Batutas and
Mandevilles--who were too much occupied with the novelty of everything
they saw to bore us with their opinions, and who were untrammelled by
the slightest idea of publishing a resume of political, religious or
economic conclusions when they got home. What an infinitesimal
proportion of us understand even our own country! Why, then, obscure and
flatten our impressions of foreign lands by supposing, and preparing to
make others believe, that we can understand them after a cursory study
of a few weeks or months?

Mrs. Brassey is not a literary woman. She has no "mission," and makes no
pretension