y elect their consulting physician, but so far the
society has preferred to elect Dr. Dutton to this position.

In these days of enforced combinations for economy there is no reason
why such societies of health should not multiply, to the manifest
benefit of all parties concerned.

E.H.

LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

The Cossacks: A Tale of the Caucasus in 1852. By Count Leo Tolstoy.
Translated from the Russian by Eugene Schuyler. New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons.

Russian novels, to judge from the specimens that have been presented to
English readers, are prose poems rather than novels in the English sense
of the word, dealing more with poetic phases than with those details and
events of ordinary life which go to make up English and American novels
of the better class. With whatever elaboration of plot or the reverse,
they are distinctly artistic compositions, in which every part is in
unison with a dominant idea, and their effect, not being scattered or
diluted, is single and more or less forcible. Their method is the
reverse of analytical. Nothing, for example, could be further from the
pregnant sentences, the exhaustive analysis, of George Eliot, whose
books are freighted with the accumulated and ever-accumulating wisdom of
a life, than the poetic suggestiveness of Tourgueneff's creations, in
which a wealth of material is sacrificed to artistic perfection, and the
highest thought often seems to lie between the lines. George Eliot lays
bare the innermost souls of her characters--we enter fully into their
lives and thoughts: with Tourgueneff's it is left to a glance of the
eye, a few passionate words, to reveal the mind within. In _The
Cossacks_ this absence of analysis is still more apparent. It is a
picture of a curious and simple race, painted, not from within, but from
the outside or Russian point of view. But here is no refining, no
affectation of pastoral simplicity. _The Cossacks_ is distinctly a
primitive poem, one which can scarcely be classed either as idyl or
epic, though, in spite of its scenes being mainly rural, it perhaps
approaches more nearly to the epic. There is an Homeric simplicity in
its descriptions of half-drunken warriors with their superb physique,
their bravado, their native dignity and singleness of character.
Marianka, the beautiful heroine, passes from one picture to another in
her quiet, regular toil. Whether, clad in a loose skirt of pink cotton,
she drives the