f
gravitation, and the demonstration by Cuvier of the existence of races
of animals and plants on the globe anterior to those now existing, it
proves to be of almost indefinite application, and, like those
doctrines, has revolutionized science.

The peculiar scientific views here presented this is no place to
criticize. But we may say that to every student of liberal culture this
work is essential. Every teacher's table and every school-library should
be furnished with it.

_Hannah Thurston: A Story of American Life_. By BAYARD TAYLOR.
New York: G.P. Putnam.

Mr. Bayard Taylor evidently does not subscribe to the theory which
"Friends in Council" attributes to a large class: "that men cannot excel
in more things than one; and that, if they can, they had better be quiet
about it." Having already achieved a reputation as a traveller, a poet,
and a secretary to a foreign legation, he now enters the lists with the
novelists, who must look well to their laurels, if they would not have
them snatched from their brows by this new-comer.

The book is called "A Story of American Life." It is American life, just
as the statue of the Venus de' Medici or the Apollo Belvedere is the
representation of the human figure. No Athenian belle, no Delphic
athlete, stood for those beautiful shapes; but the nose was modelled
from one copy, the limbs from another, the brow from a third, and the
result is a joy forever. So the American life portrayed in this story is
a conglomeration, and partially a caricature, of the various _isms_
which have disturbed the strata of our social life. That early American
village should present within its outmost circle the collection of
peculiarities gathered here would be little less than marvellous. That
they are found in so many American villages as to justify their being
attributed to American villages in general is preposterous. Certainly,
this picture does not daguerreotype New England, however it may be in
New York,--and though New England is small and provincial and New York
is large and cosmopolitan, still we respectfully submit that any
characteristic which may belong to New York and does not belong to New
England is local and not national; and though a writer, for his own
convenience and the better to convey his moral, may, if he choose, group
all the wickednesses and weaknesses of the land in one secluded spot, he
ought not to convey to strangers so wrong an idea of our rural social
life as to