find such a book as this without an index. What has been already done in some schools, and what may be looked forward to, in beautifying the school-room, is well described in a little book, 'School Sanitation and Decoration' (Boston: D. C. Heath & Co.), by Prof. Burrage of Purdue University, and the Supervisor of Drawing for Massachusetts, Mr. Bailey. The chapters on sanitation are rather slight, but they will serve to call the attention of committees of women's clubs (who are largely carrying on this good work) to what is essential on this subject. On color schemes for walls, and on the right pictures to choose for holding the attention of the children, the book is an excellent guide-as also in the difficult problem of what can be done for the country school, where interest is hard to awaken. But the most interesting feature of the book is the reproductions which it gives of school-work done by children of different grades under the influence of the art atmosphere to which they have been accustomed. The difference in beauty between the ordinary written exercises of the school-room and those which are here exhibited, must be seen to be believed in. It is difficult to predict what a change may be made in the hard practicalness of the American nature if the children in the schools are thus to have aroused in them a feeling for the beautiful.

By choice of a committee appointed by the town on the eve of the 250th anniversary of its incorporation, Rev. D. F. Lamson has written a 'History of the Town of Manchester, Essex County, Mass., 1645-1895,' and the town has published it. The book is not one of the best of its kind, less through the fault of the historian than through the defect of his material; Manchester not presenting so many points of historic interest as some other towns. The emphasis is where it generally is in such local histories-on the several wars to which the town has contributed men, and on ecclesiastical matters. In 1838 Edward Everett claimed for the town a survivor of Braddock's defeat, but Mr. Lamson cannot authenticate the doubtful honor. In the Revolutionary war the town seems to have done its full part, both in the preliminary Committee of Correspondence and on the embattled field. Quite as proud was its distinction in the anti-slavery time when, before the days of the Republican party, there was a Manchester Abolition Society more than one hundred strong. As in Marblehead the fishing business made way for shoe-making, so here it made way for cabinet-making, the growth of Gloucester as the great fishing centre operating in either case injuriously to the fishermen. Later the cabinet-making succumbed to the competition of the Boston market, and the town suffered a decay from which it has been only partly rallied by the influx of summer residents. The first of these was Richard H. Dana, the poet, to whom four generations of his descendants have succeeded; but to Dr. Cyrus A. Bartol is given the credit of having been the chief Uitlander, a child of light, whose wisdom in his generation has not been surpassed by the children of this world. The sea change which the name of the town has undergone began with James T. Fields. But "Manchester by the Sea" is a title which has no legal standing.

1

In his 'History of Trade between the United Kingdom and the United States' Mr.

Sydney J. Chapman has merely outlined the subject, and, therefore, gives an impression of not having mastered the multitude of facts necessary to a full comprehension of it. It is true, in a sense, that tariff legislation in the United States has been directed against the industries of England, but it is more true that commerce has overcome such an artificial barrier, and the English market has ever been our best market. The rise of Germany as a great manufacturing nation, and the adoption of protection by the Continental Powers, have modified the ascendancy of England's commerce, but have not been able to alter its preeminence in the trade of the world. If the United States is to take the first place, as seems inevitable, it will be through its natural advantages and not through its tariff. We wish Mr. Chapman had dwelt upon the causes of the commercial power of both countries. It is not enough to quote figures, and to take a few references from Wells and Taussig, while neglecting the history of commercial policy on both continents. The all too sketchy quality of the work is evident when the later chapters are compared with those of Noyes, who understands his subject thoroughly, and maintains a just balance between the natural and the political elements involved in the development. The publishers of Mr. Chapman's book are Swan Sonnenschein & Co., London (New York: Macmillan).

Prof. W. Watson of the Royal College of Science in London has produced 'A TextBook of Physics' (Longmans), which, by means of full explanations of matters of difficulty, sets the principles of the subject in as clear a light as a one-volume treatise could well do. Here and there it becomes almost brilliant. We notice in it, too, sundry recent items that probably here make their first appearance in a text-book. Yet we cannot say that it is the ideal treatise we are awaiting from the hands of some man born for such sort of work. In his 896 pages of fine print, the author might have found room for less meagre tables of constants and for references to the classical memoirs. In places the distinction between words and facts is not sharply drawn. Occasionally we meet with such statements as that "Thales, who lived about the commencement of the Christian era, discovered that amber, when rubbed, acquires the property of attracting light bodies." Possibly some German higher critic may have suggested that the report of Diogenes Laërtius about that discovery may refer to some later, unknown Thales. But, if so, this late Thales was not the first discoverer of a fact mentioned as well known by Plato, in that passage of the "Timæus" which almost anticipates Le

Sage's conjecture about attraction; and no critic has impugned the authenticity of the "Timæus" since Schelling abandoned his doubts about it. To say that Thales of Miletus lived about the commencement of the Christian era is like saying that Roger Bacon lectures on physics in the Royal College of Science with mediæval exactitude about ancient history.

Drs. Fowler and Godlee's 'Diseases of the Lungs' (Longmans) opens with many good plates and diagrammatic drawings, showing the anatomy of the chest-walls and their contained viscera, and their relations one to the other. Following this is a chapter on general physical diagnosis, and then the diseases are taken up one by one in the usual

on tuberculosis, as was to be expected, are particularly full. The value of the open-air treatment and of sanatoria is fully recognized, but the value of the "sanatorium treatment" in addition to the fresh air does not seem to us sufficiently so. All possible processes that may occur in the lungs or elsewhere as the result of lung trouble are described at greater or less length. We were much disappointed to find no mention, even, of the value of the X-rays in the diagnosis of diseases of the lung and pleura; though there is a skiogram of the hand in the chapter on pulmonary osteo-arthropathy.

The third volume in A. Parmentier's 'Album Historique,' published in Paris by Armand Colin & Cie., deals with the 16th and 17th centuries, of which fifteen hundred engravings after contemporary prints, paintings, and other works of art or of useful manufacture, buildings, etc., exhibit the popular dress, lodging, furniture, weapons, religion, education, commerce, agriculture, industries, fine arts, etc. Many of these faosimiles or engravings could, of course, be replaced by better copies by means of modern processes, but they serve well enough the purpose of comparison for a large number of European countries. The accompanying text gives a general view of the civilization of the period, and as heretofore there are very full indexes.

An historical account of the teaching of speech to the deaf, by Dr. Alex. Graham Bell, is begun in the Association Review for February. The earliest attempt in this country seems to have been at Rowley, Mass., in 1679, when, according to the church records, a Mr. Philip Nelson pretended to cure a deaf and dumb boy. Francis Green of Boston, however, was "the pioneer promoter of free schools for the deaf-both in England and America, the first parent of a deaf child to plead for the education of all deaf children"; and an interesting description of his efforts to this end, beginning in 1781, is given. They included two anonymous publications, one entitled 'Vox oculis subjecta'; the other, a translation of the Abbé de l'Epée's 'Method of Educating the Deaf and Dumb.' Among the other contents are extracts from the report of Mr. Lars A. Havstad, who was sent by the Norwegian Government to inspect the schools for the deaf in this country, and a suggestive paper on the use and abuse of the memory in education.

The National Geographic Magazine (Washington) for February opens with a description of some geographic features of southern Patagonia, with a discussion of their Particular origin, by M. J. B. Hatcher. stress is laid on the unique position of the continental watershed, which, nearly throughout Patagonia, lies far to the eastward of the main range of the Cordilleras, and in many instances extends even beyond the lowermost foothills of the mountains. It was the ignorance of this fact which led to the boundary dispute between Argentina and Chile. A summary is given of the three years' kite work of the Weather Bureau. Nearly four thousand observations were taken at elevations of from one thousand to eight thousand feet, with the result, among other things, that "the mean rate of diminution of temperature with increase of altitude was found to be five degrees for each one thousand feet." Prof. W. M. Davis

addition to the history of the beginnings of printing and bookselling in England. Blades's exhaustive volumes remain, of course, the authority of prime value, but Mr. Duff adds seven books to those enumerated by Blades, giving a total of ninety-eight printed by Caxton in England. It is now thought that three of those in Blades's list were produced after Caxton died, and that two of those printed at Bruges did not appear until after his departure for England. Two varieties of type have also been added to those represented by Blades. There can be little doubt that the list of Caxton's books is still incomplete; but, as Mr. Duff points out, it is not the mere number of books he printed between 1477 and 1491, but the fact that he edited almost every book he issued and translated twenty-five or more of them, which makes Caxton's career so remarkable.

-The probability that we know of only a part of the output from Caxton's press is very nearly a certainty as regards his successor, Wynkyn de Worde. De Worde printed at least sixty-eight small tracts, in addition to his larger books; of forty-seven of these, only a single copy, often imperfect, is known to be in existence. The manner in which these books have been preserved is well illustrated by the 'Sarum Horal,' printed by William de Machlinia about 1485. Eight leaves of this little service-book exist at Oxford, seven are in the British Museum, four at Lincoln, and two at Cambridge. All of these came from worn-out copies of the book which had been used as waste by a contemporary binder in stiffening the covers of other books. Competition in the printing trade began in London in 1480, and the result was a very marked immediate improvement in the quality of Caxton's work. Presses had been set up at Oxford and at St. Albans a year or two earlier, and before 1501 there were at least six master-printers who had tried to supply the English demand for books. Their efforts seem to have been unsuccessful, for many commissions were sent to printers at Paris, Venice, Rouen, and elsewhere for books wanted by the English buyers. They also had to meet the competition of the stationers, who imported books printed to their order and with their imprint, and also of travelling salesmen from the Continent, who seem to have distributed considerable numbers of foreign printed books in the provincial towns.

-The author of 'Kraft und Stoff,' recently deceased, at the age of seventy-five, was not only a thoroughly scientific man, but also an exceedingly interesting personality. The healing art seems to have been a sort of professional patrimony of his family: his grandfather, father, uncle, his oldest brother George, and he himself were medical practitioners. There was also in their mental constitution a rich poetic vein, an heirloom of the Frankish-Alemannic Odenwälder, still famous for the wealth and beauty of their traditional George was only twenty-one when he wrote a tragedy, entitled "Danton's Tod: Dramatische Bilder aus der Schreckenszeit," a work revealing great imaginative power and replete with vigorous and vivid descriptions of the "Reign of Terror," but with the lack of artistic moderation peculiar to the productions of the transitional storm-and-stress period in German literature. There is no doubt that he would have achieved distinction as a man

sagas.

of letters if he had not died at the age of twenty-five, as a political fugitive in Switzerland, just as he was beginning a course of lectures on comparative anatomy at the University of Zurich. Also his sister Luise, who was fifty-one years old when she died on November 28, 1877, attained considerable celebrity as a poet and novelist, and, by her popular treatise on 'Die Frauen und ihr Beruf,' which has passed through half-a-dozen editions, became one of the most efficient social reformers and pioneers in opening new fields of industrial activity to women in Germany. A younger brother, Alexander, still living, professor at Valenciennes, and afterwards at Caen in France, has embodied the results of his special studies of English and French literature in two works, 'Geschichte der Englischen Poesie' and 'Französische Literaturbilder,' each in two volumes.

-Ludwig Büchner, the fifth of seven children, and as a boy remarkable for his clear intellect, tender feeling, and lively fancy, showed in early youth a strong love and critical appreciation of literature, and it was expected that this latter proclivity would determine his future career and secure for him a prominent place near the summit of Parnassus. His younger brother Alexander and his sister Luise had already appeared before the public with some success as authors when Ludwig suddenly produced his 'Kraft und Stoff,' which was at once accepted by the Frankfort publisher Meidinger and made a great sensation. A flerce controversy arose over it, and the wiseacres in the senate of the University of Tübingen put their heads together and decided that the author of such a work should not be permitted to lecture in the medical faculty of that institution, and that the venia legendi should be withdrawn; thus furnishing another illustration of the inviolability of German academic freedom as expounded by Prof. Münsterberg. It is not possible here to follow Büchner's scientific career from this first brilliant success to the time of his death. There is, however, a collection of his lyrical poems and dramas and critical essays entitled 'Der neue Hamlet,' which reveals another feature of his intellectual character, and to which we call attention because it was published under the pseudonym of "Karl Ludwig," and is therefore not generally known as his literary production, although it contains the fragment of an autobiography. The title of the volume is well chosen, for there was in his nature, as here disclosed, a strong conflict between the born idealist and the philosophic materialist, which often gave him pause and made him think that he had missed his calling. His last two works, just issued by Emil Roth in Giessen, are 'Am Sterbelager des Jahrhunderts: Blicke eines freien Denkers aus der Zeit in die Zeit,' and 'Im Dienste der Wahrheit: Ausgewählte Aufsätze aus Natur und Wissenschaft.' The first of these volumes is a second revised and enlarged edition sent by the author to the press just before his death, and adorned with his portrait as frontispiece. The second volume was found among Büchner's posthumous papers, and consists of fifty-one articles, which had appeared in different periodicals from 1891 to 1899 and been arranged by him chronologically for publication under the title they now bear.

-Vittorio Bersezio, whose death at Turin was announced last week, was one of the

most eminent Italian men of letters of the past half-century. Born near Coni in 1830, he displayed such precocity that at the age of eleven he wrote the libretti of lyric plays which were performed. Going, while still a lad, to Turin, he began to write for the press, and was at different times in the employ of Valerio and Brofferio, the radical leaders. When the Revolution broke out, in 1848, he enlisted and served in the campaign in Lombardy. Then he resumed his literary work, writing for several journals, from the dignifled Rivista Contemporanea to the satirical Fischietto. His "Political Profiles," sketches of the leading Italian public men of the early fifties, gave him a reputation. But mere journalism did not content him. He wrote a series of novels ('La Famiglia,' 'L'Amor di Patria,' 'L'Odio,' etc.) which were successful in Italy, and were translated, some of them at least, into French and German. He also tried his hand at writing plays, of which "Micca d'Andormo," "Romulus" (acted by Salvini), "Le Pasque Veronesi," and "Il Perdono" were written in literary Italian, and several others, more popular still, in Piedmontese dialect. Finally, he devoted himself to writing the Life of Victor Emanuel II., which he published in eight volumes (1878-'95), under the title "Trent' Anni di Vita Italiana'; a work too diffuse to rank among the first, but still full of valuable matter, with the impressions and reminiscences at first hand of an observer of the period described. In these days, when one short story in a magazine is supposed to confer perpetual fame on its author, it is wholesome to record, even briefly, the career of Bersezio, who excelled as journalist, novelist, playwright, and historian, but always went forward in search of higher achievement, and never contented himself with applause for work completed.

-In writing on Bábar for the 'Rulers of India' series (Clarendon Press), Prof. Stanley Lane-Poole deals with a career which centres about Samarkand quite as much as about Delhi. The early ambition of Bábar was to found an empire in the valleys of the Oxus and Jaxartes. He bent his course to the southward only after repeated failures in the land of his birth had proved that the route to India offered the line of least resistance. The life of this hero and conqueror falls, then, into very distinct sections. For the historian of India only the last twelve years are available, while the biographer finds in Bábar's earlier struggles and vicissitudes a subject which, though of comparatively little political consequence, is full of dramatic personal interest. No leader of Islam during the first century which followed the death of the Prophet showed more dash and intrepidity in spreading the Koran than Bábar displayed during the twenty years, 1494-1514, in his attempt to create for himself a state after his own heart. When every effort had failed, he changed his purpose with the utmost versatility, and in less than a decade brought millions upon millions of Hindus beneath his sway. Bábar is eminently a hybrid character, and Prof. Lane-Poole, in a single paragraph, thus brings out the complexity of the elements which he represents: "He is the link between central Asia and India, between predatory hordes and imperial government, between Tamerlane and Akbar. The blood of the two great scourges of Asia, Chingiz and Tímár, mixed in his veins, and to the daring and restlessness of the nomad

Tatar he joined the culture and urbanity of the Persian. He brought the energy of the Mongol, the courage and capacity of the Turk, to the listless Hindu; and, himself a soldier of fortune and no architect of empire, he yet laid the first stone of the splen. did fabric which his grandson Akbar achieved." No reference to Bábar, however fragmentary, should pass over unmentioned the celebrated autobiography which he left to be edited by his son Humáyún, and which has furnished all writers on his period with the best part of their facts. He wrote his memoirs in his native tongue, Turki, but the work was soon translated into Persian and exists in many codices. The English translation by Leyden and Erskine has put within the reach of those who are unlearned in Oriental languages one of the most delightful books of adventure ever written by a has Prof. Lane-Poole conqueror. drawn largely on this prime source for the materials of his excellent handbook.

-Part ii., vol. xxvii., of the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, contains matter of great interest to students of the Japanese language, of the Romanization of Asiatic tongues, and of the history of printing. It is a study of the work of the Jesuit Missions Press in Japan, the result of the researches of Sir Ernest Satow in the public libraries of England and the Continent, concerning those books printed in Japan at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries. Mr. Satow came to Japan in the early sixties as a student-interpreter. He is now British Minister in the Japanese Empire. In a pamphlet privately printed he gave the full results of his researches up to the year 1888, but since coming to Japan he has been fortunate enough to discover two other works printed on the same press, probably at Nagasaki. The first of these is an abridgment of the "Tai-Héi-Ki,' a celebrated historical work of the fourteenth century. The second is a small volume of fifty-eight leaves printed in Roman type, and bearing the imprint "In Collegio Iaponico Societatis Iesu, Anno 1600," and is identical in substance, but not in type, with that numbered eleven in his pamphlet, and preserved at Rome; but the one edition in Chinese characters and kana script was for the use of native converts, and the other in Roman letters for missionaries not familiar with Chinese characters or the Japanese syllabary. It is a compend of Roman Catholic theology and doctrine, and was evidently intended for the Samurai or educated classes. The spelling of the Romanized Japanese words is that of the Portuguese grammar and lexicography of the period. After five pages of introduction, Mr. Satow gives a glossary of six pages, a photolithographic reproduction of the title-page of the book, and sixty-one pages of its text. Japanese versions are here found of the Lord's Prayer, the Apostles' Creed, and the Ten Commandments, which, with the articles of the Roman ritual, may be useful for comparison with modern translations. It is an interesting question whether the Jesuit missionaries in Japan, some of whom had also been in Korea with the Japanese army of invasion, took the hint for the use of movable or "living" type from the Koreans, with whom they had been common centuries before they were known in Europe. The first ascertained use of movable type by the Japanese

was in 1598. A private reprint of Sir E. Satow's paper has just been deposited in the Boston Public Library.

GRAHAM'S SOCIAL LIFE OF SCOTLAND.

The Social Life of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century. By Henry Grey Graham. London: Adam & Charles Black. 1899. The social and economic sides of history are comparatively new subjects of inquiry and description. Ancient chroniclers and modern chroniclers, too, till the present century, were so much occupied with politiIcal events and with the personal incidents relating thereto, as hardly to notice the modes, habits, and practices of daily life,

or

now

to describe the beliefs and notions which men entertained. If they wrote of what passed in their own time, such matters were too familiar to seem to need description. If they wrote of the past, they held it beneath the dignity of history to take account of such trivialities. Macaulay was one of the first to depart from this hallowed usage, and the famous sketch of English social life in the time of Charles the Second with which his History of England opens, has stirred many authors to imitation, so that the English are pretty familiar with the ways of their ancestors from Tudor times to the present. Mr. McMaster and Mr. Edward Eggleston are among the American writers who have trodden the same path with success. For Scotland not much has been done, save in one or two of Walter Scott's novels, where incidentally the features of social life are touched upon. The subject lay out of the beaten tracks; and though there was a considerable Scottish literature in the last century, from which an impression of Scottish life might be drawn, the ornaments of that literature, with the exception of Allan Ramsay and Robert Burns, were all Edinburgh men, and reproduced the manners of their city rather than of their country. However, there comes now a new writer, a Scotchman, and indeed (as we gather) a Scottish clergyman, who gives us in these two solid volumes a large mass of information about his country in the eighteenth century, the first century in which that turbulent little country had enjoyed comparative peace, and the opportunities which peace gives of advancing in material prosperity.

He covers a good deal of ground, passing in review the society and manners of the rural districts, those of the cities, and especially of Edinburgh and Glasgow-the latter a very small town past the middle of the century; the land system, with the relations of rural classes and care of the rural poor; the Church and the various dissenting bodies which broke off from it and went on apart from it; education in schools and universities, crime and social order, the progress of industry and trade. On each of these topics a great variety of matter, often curious, has been brought together with commendable diligence, so that the book is really a valuable repertory of facts, most of them drawn from books which, in this country at least, can hardly be procured. The merit of the work lies in the abundance of the facts collected. It is clearly written, with few efforts at literary display; and (except perhaps in the ecclesiastical part) it betrays no bias either na

tional or sectional. It might perhaps have been improved by the introduction here and there of summarizing paragraphs, presenting the generalized conclusions to which, in the author's view, the facts he has collected point. However, the main thing was to bring together the facts. The reader, having an ample store of them here provided, can generalize for himself at his pleasure.

Mr. Graham 'justly remarks on the great unlikeness of Scotland to England at the time of the Union. To the traveller of today, the two countries seem to present few points of difference. The dialect of the common folk is no doubt unlike that of southeastern England, but not more unlike than is that of Lancashire or Devon. The landscape is generally rougher or sterner in its character, and the towns are built rather of stone than of brick. The parish churches are less picturesque, for the Presbyterian Reformers dealt less tenderly with the old fabrics in Scotland than the Episcopalian reformers did in England, and the country was so much poorer that the churches were at all times inferior. But perhaps the most patent difference between the countries is that in Scotland it is chiefly whiskey, in England chiefly beer, that is the drink of the people a difference which Mr. Graham shows to be not very ancient. These are trifling divergencies when compared with the broad and striking contrast which the poverty and squalor of Scotland, its plain form and rigid practice of religion, its social habits and ideas, furnished to the wealth and comfort of England, to its easygoing ecclesiastical ways, to its different ideals of life and thought, as these two countries stood in A. D. 1707, when the Treaty of Union welded them into one kingdom, and when, according to Mr. Graham, the diversity of speech was so great that Englishmen and Scotchmen scarcely understood one another. The fact is, that in 1707 Scotland was one of the most backward coun tries in Europe in every respect but one. Her population was very small, scarcely exceeding a million, and was almost entirely rural. It was extremely poor, for only a small part of the land was tilled, and the industries were insignificant. There was little trade and practically no shipping. But the race was highly intelligent and energe tic, having in the two preceding centuries produced a surprising number of men of literary distinction; and the provision of education for the people, albeit scanty, and far inferior to that which the enlightened policy of John Knox and his friends of the great reforming era had planned, was yet better than that which existed in England, or in most parts of Continental Europe. Accordingly, when peace was assured in the Lowlands after 1689-for the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 caused only temporary perturbations-and when the union with England in 1707 had thrown open trade with the English colonies, and brought the two parts of the island into closer commer cial relations with one another, there began progress which, slow at first, had in twenty or thirty years increased the value of property, raised wages as well as rents, and given a stimulus to every department of national life.

a

The steps by which this took place, and the remarkable parallelism in the development of industry and trade on the one hand and the growth of theological enlightenment on

the other, are well traced by Mr. Graham. He notes one fact of interest to tourists in Scotland. In the first half of the eighteenth century it was one of the barest and dreariest parts of Europe, the old forests having been, especially in the Lowlands, almost entirely cut down for firewood, so that house timber was hardly procurable. But about 1760 the now more progressive landowners began to plant trees on a great scale, and the large woods which may now be seen in all parts of the Lowlands, except, of course, on the higher and steeper hills, are entirely due to the taste for forestry which then grew so popular. Scotland has to-day less of the aspect of a wooded country than the centre and west of England, because few clumps of trees stand about in the fields, and there are hardly any hedgerow trees at all. But the woods are both extensive and fine, though Scotland must admit one serious inferiority to England: she has no pieces of really old forest, dating from the Middle Ages. There is nothing more beautiful in England than the sylvan scenery of the New Forest in Hampshire, of Wychwood Forest in Oxfordshire, of Savernake Forest in Wiltshire, of Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire, not to speak of others which, like Needwood in Staffordshire, have preserved fewer fine trees. In Scotland the traveller finds nothing to compare with these, nor indeed any relics of really ancient wood, save here and there among the huge clumps of fir trees in the Highland glens.

Religion and ecclesiastical affairs have been a conspicuous factor in Scottish life ever since the Reformation of the sixteenth century. It was in Scotland far more than in England a really popular movement, and left a deeper impress, which was still further deepened by the struggle against prelacy from 1638 till 1690. Calvinistic theology has done so much to mould the character of the people that Mr. Graham very properly devotes to this part of his subject a large share of his space. He paints in colors perhaps almost dark the fanaticism, the dogmatism in matters of belief, and the vehement intolerance of the Presbyterian masses in the opening years of the century -phenomena which were the natural result of the ferocious persecution to which the Covenanters had been subjected by the later Stuart kings. He remarks, with perfect truth, that, so far from the clergy having led or terrorized the laity, as Mr. Buckle (who was sometimes almost as ignorant as he was self-confident and positive) supposed, the clergy were really controlled by the laity, who displayed an interest in theology greater than that of any other contemporary European people, and hardly to be paralleled even in rural New England. He describes the gradual decline of Calvinistic stringency which went on from 1720 to 1770, and which, in the Presbyterian Church established by law, was accelerated by the growth of the Seceders and other Dissenting bodies. All the free churches in Scotland have arisen, not from any spirit of change, but from adherence to old ideas and customs. The same remark has been made of most of the Dissenters in Russia. The Cameronians held to the Covenants of the seventeenth century, and disapproved the Established Church because it had not renewed those Covenants. The Seceders of 1737 quitted the church in protest against the intrusion of ministers into parishes by

lay patronage against the will of the people; and the later and greater Secession of the Free Church in 1843, commonly called the Disruption, had the same cause.

As the seceding bodies were those which clung most tenaciously to the Calvinistic dogmas and the ancient simplicity of worship, their departure gave a freer course to latitudinarianism in the state church, so that by 1780 no small part of its more educated clergy as well as laity were deemed to be virtually Arians or Socinians. With these men, of whom Dr. Blair and the historian Robertson, principal of Edinburgh University, are the persons now best remembered, and with a knot of cultivated lawyers and some university professors, such as Adam Smith and Thomas Reid, began the brilliant literary era of modern Scotland, which lasted down till, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the influence of London drew the bulk of Scottish literary talent away from Edinburgh, leaving comparatively few men of science and learning in Scotland, except those who were kept there by university chairs. And this epoch (1770-1810) was, by an interesting coincidence, that which saw the meridian of Scottish poetry in Burns, and the dawn of Scottish romantic fiction in Walter Scott. Before it closed, a change came over the spirit of the Scottish church. The socalled "Evangelical Revival," beginning about 1790, a little later than it had begun in England, drove out the "moderate" theology of Robertson and his contemporaries, and it was not till about 1870 that the influence of German and Dutch theologians, and especially of the new school of Biblical criticism, began to tell powerfully on Scotland. At present that school is dominant there, and the Scottish Presbyterian amazed clergy stand at the stringent orthodoxy and intolerance of critical methods which they note in the Presbyterians of the United States and of Ireland.

It is in this part of his book that Mr. Graham may perhaps be thought to fall rather below the level of an objective and dispassionately philosophical historian. Recounting with grim pleasure the instances, numerous enough, of bigotry, superstition, and harshness among the fanatical and ultra-orthodox ecclesiastics and laity of the first half of the eighteenth century, he makes too little allowance for the causes which had made them what they were, and does less than justice to the earnestness and devotion which half re

SKRINE'S HEART OF ASIA. The Heart of Asia; A History of Russian Turkestan and the Central Asian Khanates from the Earliest Times. By Francis Henry Skrine, formerly a member of H. M. Indian Civil Service, and Edward Denison Ross, Ph.D., Professor of Persian in University College, London. London: Methuen & Co.; Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co. 1899. Pp. xi+444.

There has long been much need of a scholarly yet readable account within reasonable limits of space of the Russian advance in Central Asia and of the past and present condition of the Turkoman tribes. The older history of Central Asia, too, has been a picturesque blank for most of us. Vague ideas of the conquests of Alexander, of the Oxus and Jaxartes-amnes fabulosi— of Prester John and Tamerlane with his "pampered jades of Asia," of sultans of Casgar from the 'Arabian Nights' and "Merou's bright palaces and groves" from "The Veiled Prophet of Khorasan,' have jarred against newspaper paragraphs about Merv and its mervousness, Afghan and Pamir boundary squabbles, trans-Caspian petroleum, and railways to China. We have had books of travel, more or less untrustworthy and biassed; we have had Sir Henry Howorth's great 'History of the Mongols,' and others of lesser repute; Col. Yule illumined Marco Polo and Cathay; ten years ago Lord (then Mr.) Curzon's 'Russia in Central Asia' appeared; but there was nothing by which the ordinary reader could arrange his jumbled ideas and string his facts, real and ideal, on a thread solid enough to carry them. The Heart of Asia' undoubtedly fully meets this need. It sums up past history and present condition with admirable thoroughness and clearness. The amount of detail which its learned authors have packed into a single volume is equalled

There is much else in the book that well deserves attention and commendation, and many of the facts it notes are full of significance. Though Scotland was SO rude, there was far less highway robbery there than in England; and the much greater mildness of the criminal law was accompanied by a much greater rarity of crime (except infanticide). But serfdom among coalminers and salt-workers lasted down till 1799. Political liberty scarcely existed, and the representative system was a farce. There was very little coin in circulation, and the roads were impassable till after the middle of the century. Indeed, it would be hard to imagine a region more unlike the

show, and the readableness which they have attained. The sources upon which they base are excellent. Both Prof. Ross and Mr. Skrine have personal knowledge of Central Asia; and Skrine's part of the work, the description of government, of development of railways, of commerce, and of the social life, is from his own observations throughout. Prof. Ross has made the fullest use of Russian and Mongol authorities, which in itself would give the book high value; he has used at first-hand the Arabic and Persian chroniclers, though with a leaning to the Persian which neither the scientific historian nor the Arabist will much approve the Persian version of at-Tabari, for example, can have no authority beside the original-but which is excusable in a professor of Persian; students of the later Roman Empire generally find it expedient to get behind Gibbon to his sources, and D'Herbelot is respectable but