recorded observations has led Prof. Davis to consider the probability that a large share of the so-called lacustrine formations may really be of fluviatile or other subaerial origin. He points out that, while river deposits and lake deposits are similar in many respects, the marginal parts of a fluviatile deposit may be characterized by variations of texture and structure, and occasionally by filled channels and lateral unconformities. The author, however, states that the object of his paper is to promote discussion rather than to announce conclusions, and he does not undertake to decide the points mooted.

Under authority from the Director of the Marine Biological Laboratory, Dr. C. O. Whitman, the Association for Maintaining the American Women's Table at the Zoological Station at Naples offers for the summer of 1900 the free use of an investigator's table at the Wood's Holl Laboratory to any applicant who is eligible for the Naples table, and who may desire to secure the benefit of preliminary work at Wood's Holl before making her application for the Naples Station. Applications for the Wood's Holl table, as well as for the Naples table, should be made before May 1 to the Secretaof the association, Miss Florence M. ry Cushing, No. 8 Walnut Street, Boston, Mass., by whom circulars will be sent on applica. tion.

The Justin Winsor prize of $100, offered by the American Historical Association for the encouragement of less well-known writers, will be awarded for the year 1900 to the best unpublished monographic work based upon original investigation in American history that shall be submitted to the committee of award on or before October 1, 1900. If not typewritten, the work must be written legibly upon only one side of the sheet, and must be in form ready for publication. In making the award, the committee will take into consideration, not only research and originality, but also clearness of expression, logical arrangement, and literary form. The prize will not be awarded unless the work submitted shall be of a high degree of excellence. The successful essay will be published by the American Historical Association. Prof. Charles M. Andrews of Bryn Mawr is chairman of the committee.

It is proposed to found at the University of Pennsylvania a memorial chair associated with the name of the late Dr. Daniel Garrison Brinton, whose valuable library was given by him to the University shortly before his death. The sum of fifty thousand dollars is sought from private sources, as will be explained on application to the Brinton Memorial Committee, No. 44 Mt. Vernon Street, Boston.

Count Angelo De Gubernatis completed on April 7 his sixtieth year, and, having rounded out also forty years of literary productivity from his first youthful output, the drama "Werner," a jubilee commemoration took place, participated in by scholars and by women of the peninsula. Albums, gold and bronze medals, an anthology, are some of the forms in which the movement found expression. It is announced that De Gubernatis's final labor (and a vast one) will be a 'Biblioteca letteraria femminile italiana,' or a biographical and bibliographical account of the activity of Italian female writers from the earliest period to the present day.

Harper's for

-The opening article in April is on municipal art by Charles H. Caffin, with illustrations by L. A. Shafer. Mr. Caffin traces the present development of municipal-art societies to "a principle of much earlier inception," of which he finds the germ in the "Laurel Hill Association" founded in 1853 in Stockbridge, Mass. "Consciously or unconsciously," the establishment of the Fairmount Park Art Association of Philadelphia in 1871 was "an extension of the same principle to the wider scope of a city." Now we have the Municipal Art Society of New York, founded in 1893, and the Municipal Art Society of Cincinnati, organized in 1894. Strangely enough, however, "the greatest progress has been made in Boston," where no association exists at all. This is because Boston not only is naturally æsthetic, but has a considerable fund of what is now called "civism" to draw on; hence the finest park system in the world, the Public Library, reaching the highest "artistic standard," the restoration of the Bulfinch State House, and the promised mural paintings; hence, too, the Shaw memorial, and the salvation of Copley Square from a sky-scraper. In New York-but we forbear. Mr. Caffin would have municipal control exercised in limiting the height of buildings; would have arcades here and there; and would encourage the planting of trees, and make everything beautiful, including newspaperstalls. He very justly observes that it is not, for the present, to be expected or desired that the work of beautification should be undertaken, with us, by the municipal authorities. We would not intrust it even to the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court. Mr. Poultney Bigelow, in "A Successful Colonial Experiment," gives an account of Hong Kong, with illustrations by R. Caton Woodville. Mr. Bigelow thinks that "the problem which Great Britain has solved at Hong Kong has much in common with what confronts us in Manila"; but we are certainly not employing the same means in the Philippines. Hong Kong was made a great free port and Chinese commercial paradise by means of free trade and a good consular and administrative system. Mr. Bigelow makes no mention of an army of 50,000 men, or tramp consuls, ever having been tried. "A sailor ashore" is proverbially in great danger of going astray; this reflection is suggested by Capt. Mahan's extraordinary "Problem of Asia," which is evidently to appear soon in the form of a book. We can make nothing of it, except that Russia has a centre and two flanks, many thousands of miles apart, and that it is best to make a flank rather than a frontal attack upon her-in which we cordially agree; but Napoleon found this out long ago.

The Atlantic has an interesting paper on "The Consular Service of the United States," by George F. Parker. Mr. Parker calls attention, among other things, to "something which threatens to become an intolerable nuisance"-the monthly issue of Consular Reports. The painful fact about the information contained in these reports as to trade and industry, he says, is that no one goes to them for information about the matters to which they relate. There are better sources; then why keep them up? Mainly, it would appear, to provide Government

literature for the back districts. Mr. Parker says that in the twenty-two years during which these reports have been accumulating "it would be difficult to recall one report of really undoubted economic value." Nor will there be any as long as consuls are mainly trained in the art of "holding on to a job." Indeed, we are inclined to think that, even with a reformed consular service, these reports would be of little value so long as a consul is, as with us, a mere official clerk, instead of being, as he is in the case of many other countries, a man of business, and consequently skilled in business questions. Mr. Parker points out incidentally that many of our most distinguished consuls abroad have done some excellent writing, but that neither Howells, nor Hawthorne, nor Burritt, nor Bret Harte -to mention a few of the most conspicuous-ever made or attempted to make a reputation as economical statisticians. The old-fashioned American mercantile consul is as extinct as the Dodo. "One of the Guild," who writes on "The Perplexities of a College President," has no doubt good reasons for concealing his identity. We regret the suppression of it. His main idea seems to be that a university should be managed as nearly like a railroad as possible, strangely overlooking the fact that one of the crying evils of the day is the production of college presidents who subordinate the interests of learning to those merely material. The article is conceived in the spirit and couched in the style of the educational drummer-already too much with us. Henry James has a fantastic story called "Maud-Evelyn," and John Buchan contributes a paper (with the strange title, "A Comic Chesterfield') on the Earl of Buchan. If Mr. Henry Loomis Nelson has foible it is that of knowing too much about the future. His article on "The Political Horizon" is of that anticipatory character which is so apt to look prophetic until "you know." The political horizon has already changed since he wrote this article.

a

-In Scribner's the most solid article is a short review of Ruskin by W. C. Brownell, who thinks that "to the preponderance of his emotional over his intellectual side" are attributable "the two great defects which imperil his position as an English classic, namely, the lack of substance in his matter and the lack of form in his style." Ruskin, like Carlyle, is unfortunate in having outlived his period. Not only are they dead themselves, but most of those who knew what it was to derive inspiration from them are dead, too. To Mr. Brownell, who in this is representative of the modern turn of thought, Ruskin is evidently antipathetican emotionalist, a sentimentalist, in an age in which the "higher reaches" are "unsatisfactory if they are pervaded merely or chiefly by emotion." It is an almost inevitable consequence of this view that Ruskin did not really either know or like art, and that he was a sort of emotional and dithyrambic oracle of nature. He qught, that is, to have been a poet, and he ought never to have undertaken æsthetic criticism at all. Mr. H. J. Whigham's account of the extraordinary battle of Magersfontein is interesting, especially as he confirms the worst that has been said to the discredit of the generalship on the English side. "As for the night assault at Magersfontein, one can hardly now

ly, and, so far as his statement of it goes, convincingly. The partisan on either side, nevertheless, sees the same picture differently. To Mr. Fitzpatrick, the execution of the burghers at Slagter's Nek and the harsh treatment of Bezuidenhout are only deplorable affairs. That is, he estimates them coolly, as isolated human transactions. By the Boers, on the contrary, these wrongs, committed by individuals upon other individuals-neither of great account in the world's history-have been accepted as national grievances. The victims of Slagter's Nek are to them what the dead of the Boston Massacre were to us; and no history can justly ignore it. On the other hand, the murder of Capt. Elliot by the Boers while under safe-conduct is equally charged by the British to the discredit of the Transvaal, while the Boers doubtless dismiss it as a "regrettable incident.".

In his account of the Raid, which he justifies in its conception as an aid to a Johannesburg uprising, Mr. Fitzpatrick is manifestly the partisan-not suppressing Cecil Rhodes's financial connection with it, but omitting any substantial relation of its more sordid features. For instance, he airily dismisses the dispatch-box of Major Robert White, whose contents so humiliated England, as "a veritable conjurer's hat, from which Mr. Krüger produced to an admiring and astonished world the political equivalents of eggs and goldfish, pigeons and white mice." These citations are fair instances of the party historian's faults of vision. The last is a good example of his lively style.

His narrative begins with the Great Trek of 1837, the northward emigration of the Boers, occasioned in part by the abolition of slavery at the Cape, the virtual confiscation of slave-property, the harsh administration of the law; and, in part, by the blundering of British colonial administrators. From this epoch he skips to the year 1877, when the South African Republic was bankrupt within and threatened by the Zulus from without. "I had rather," said President Burgers to the Raad, "be a policeman under a strong government than the President of such a state," as "degenerate" as Turkey, and, like her, calling for outside intervention. With the approval of the President and on the petition of many burghers, the British Commissioner, Shepstone, annexed the Republic. At first the act was not only acquiesced in but popular.

"The real mistakes of the British Government began after annexation. The failure to fulfil promises; the deviations from old ways of government; the appointment of unsuitable officials who did not understand the people or their language; the neglect to convene the Volksraad or to hold fresh elections, as definitely promised; the establishment of military rule by military men, who treated the Boers with harshness and contempt, and would make no allowance for their simple, old-fashioned ways, their deepseated prejudices, and, if you like, their stupid opposition to modern ideas. With the revival of trade and the removal of responsibilities and burdens, came time to think and talk. The eaten bread was forgotten, and so the men who had remained passive and recorded formal protests when they should have resisted, began their Repeal agitation. All the benefits which the Boers hoped from the annexation had been reaped. Their debts had been paid; their trade and credit restored; their enemies were being dealt with. Repeal would rob them of none of these; they would, in fact, eat their cake and still have it" (pp. 24-5).

The war that ensued closed with the mortifying defeat of the British at Majuba Hill, and their withdrawal from the Transvaal, except as their authority was maintained by the disputed "suzerainty" provisions of the Pretoria and London conventions. A very intelligent comparison of the arguments on both sides of this question, given in Mr. Alleyne Ireland's book, would seem to favor the English theory that the admitted reservation to England of the right to veto all treaties made by the South African Republic, deprived it of the chief attribute of a sovereign state.

landers, according to Mr. Fitzpatrick, whose story differs little from Prof. Ramsay's, Mr. Hammond's, and others', found a sort of Dutch Tammany in the land, who kept the franchise in their own hands, partly by law, and partly by what we should call "tinkering with the charter" and "fixing" the registration of voters. By this means, railway transportation was limited to lines charging exorbitant rates for the benefit of the "ring." The manufacture and importation of dynamite was its monopoly, and it fattened on an illicit liquor trade with the natives, unlawful preëmptions of land, fraudulent contracts, sinecures, and other corruption, even going beyond the common cheats known to our baser politics

alists in the Transvaal, whom he had lately assured of his support, saying that, whether or not the annexation was wrong, "that would not warrant us in doing fresh, distinct, and separate wrong by a disregard of the obligation which that annexation entailed." His action was greeted with scorn by the English and contempt by the Cape Dutch, who regarded it as a concession to force; and, by encouraging the latter to persist in local misgovernment and maltreatment of the former, kept alive the grudge that is now being bloodily settled.

On the erection of the South African Republic, after the separation, in 1882, Mr. Stephanus Johannes Paulus Krüger was elected President, and has since held this office continuously. The political history of his country could not be much more absorbed in his own were he the Grand Monarque. As Mr. Fitzpatrick draws his portrait, it is not attractive. He is a sort of vulgar Bismarck-or (to speak more aptly) Mark Hanna-of the veldt, with a taint of personal corruption about him that never clung to the German, and a physical courage and blunt wit not commonly attributed to the Ohioan; a statesman manqué, perhaps, but an uncommonly shrewd and forceful Boss. In his youth he was a raider into the after Orange Free State the manner of Jameson; in middle life, a civil servant under British rule, whom a refusal of increased salary drove into the opposition (fide Mr. Fitzpatrick). In his old age he has become a furious chauvinist, seeking to maintain a Dutch oligarchy within his so-called Republic; aggrandizing it at the expense of neighboring tribes; and, long prior to the Raid, in the British belief, arming and plotting for the overthrow of their supremacy in South Africa.

The discovery of the Witwatersrand gold fields in 1886 at once made the supremacy worth contending for and gave him funds to work with. In 1885 the revenues of the Republic were £177,877. In 1895, just before the Raid, they had risen to £3,912,095. For the year 1898 they were £4,087,852. The expenditures kept equal pace with the revenues; and, as very little went for education, sanitation, or public works, it may be guessed how the Cruesot guns lately about Ladysmith were acquired. With the opening of the gold fields came the influx of the Uitlanders, and with them the recrudescence of race trouble. Something like this we might have had ourselves had the immigrant been to us never anything else but an "alien," outnumbering us in the land; possessing most of the wealth, by superior industry; paying most of the taxes-but having no voice in the government. The Uit

active laws. Incidentally the civil government was everywhere inefficient, antiquated, and unbearable; and petitions, mass-meetings, and remonstrances went for nothing.

This was a bad state of affairs. The error of the Uitlanders lay in trying to cure it by violence. The wrongs they were suffering were mostly against property. The shooting of the man Edgar is an almost solitary offence against personal liberty; and even in his case the facts are disputed. Had the Uitlanders persisted in peaceful agitation they would ultimately, perhaps, many years hence, have succeeded. They tried to hasten nature, and they are now suffering more from the convulsion they have brought on than they did from the ague they sought to Had the Johannesburgers risen in unaided and successful revolution, they would have met with almost universal approval. By their bringing in Jameson and his troops they brought on themselves equally general condemnation, and, moreover, by this outrage on the Transvaal, gave the Boers a retrospective sanction for all their long abuse of power. It is the Jameson Raid that still hampers British policy, through the cleavage it made in British public opinion.

cure.

Yet Krüger and his government of oppression and corruption existed before the Raid; and after it they were worse than before. Nothing could have exceeded the duplicity and rapacity with which he chaffered over the lives of the Raiders and the Reformers, while his suppression of inconvenient courts of justice would have done credit to James II. As did that unfortunate ruler, when his enemies presented him with the game, he threw it away. His role after the Raid should have been dignity, simplicity, magnanimity. Instead, he became violent of speech, treacherous of word, harsh of action. The immense party in England that would have saved him, he chilled, alienated, and finally scattered by his declaration of war, the madness that precedes destruction. "If a crisis should occur,'" he asked an American deputation who were seeking reforms of him, 'on which side shall I find the Americans?' The answer was, 'On the side of liberty and good government.' The President replied, 'You are all alike, tarred with the same brush: you are British in your hearts' (p. 135).

We have taken Mr. Fitzpatrick's book as our leading text because it is the most quoted recent work on the subject, and traces the development of the present troubles over many years. Mr. Hobson's 'War in South Africa,' an even better written book, should be read in connection with it, however, as its most effective answer. This book, which has won the unstinted praise

una

of Mr. Bryce, presents strong arguments touching the needlessness and destructiveness of the war. According to Mr. Hobson, there was no "Dutch conspiracy," and the conceded corruption and inefficiency of the Transvaal Government worked no sufficient hardships upon the Outlanders to make a casus belli. Moreover, there was no nimity against reform among the burghers, but Joubert's liberal party nearly came to civil war with the Krügerites about it before the Raid compelled the two parties to act together. Krüger our author finds lacking in "a nice sense of honor," but more of a naïf, seventeenth-century, covenanting zealot than a crafty conspirator. Of his conduct in securing the arrest and conviction of the reformers, he says nothing, nor is there a word on the amazing induction of Judge Gregorowski from the Free State to preside at their trial, nor the subsequent degradation of the Bench and the passing of retroactive laws. So we may put Mr. Hobson's book, also, down as partisan, though its tone is not unfair.. He does not like the worldly and vicious city of Johannesburg nor its mongrel population, its greedy ambitions, its lying and venal newspapers. He puts Rhodes, Chamberlain, and Milner in the category of the Beits and Barnatos. The war was forced on the Boers, he thinks, and may bring the awful catastrophe of a black invasion on the country as a sequel. In his sketch of the Afrikander Bond and its part in Cape politics, Mr. Hobson adds much that Mr. Fitzpatrick does not advert to.

Mr. Ireland's book is a companion to the little synopsis of the Dreyfus case published during its progress by the same house. Easy to slip in the pocket and to read quickly, it will no doubt be in much demand on the part of those who wish a brief digest of the matters in dispute. In the main, it follows Mr. Fitzpatrick very closely, the condensation of his bulky book being well done. It contains a bibliographical appendix.

The 'Story of the Boers,' published by authority of the South African Republics, is argumentative, rhetorical, and emotional. It states their contentions at the present writing, and their reasons for American mediation, so that they can be quickly understood, but the statement is necessarily one-sided. It is, frankly, a campaign document, and of rather exceptional power.

"The Afrikanders' is the least profound, and, in point of chronological relation, the most extended, of any of these books. The history of South Africa for the past century is told in an elementary way, also with considerable ability. This, like the foregoing, is a pro-Boer work, the Raid and the executions at Slagter's Nek being well in the foreground of the picture. Both of these two books are illustrated, but lack indexes; Mr. Hooker's has a map.

The late Mr. Steevens's last letters from the front have been collected and printed, together with his portrait and an appreciation of him by Mr. Vernon Blackburn. His youth and his talent make his untimely end a source of great regret. On the English side, perhaps no life so full of real possibilities has been lost in this war, in spite of his having chosen a style at once brilliant and bad, calculated to produce a flashlight picture on the mind, all high lights and deep shadows. Some passages in this fragmentary book are of uncommon merit far finer than his Dreyfus story, where he was out of his element; and when the man

We have found Mrs. Howe's Reminiscences more interesting as read here continuously than when we were taking our pleasure serially in the Atlantic Monthly, in which they first appeared. It is a very interesting picture that she makes of her early life in New York, and the more valuable because our annalists and autobiographers have so much oftener been of Boston than of New York extraction. As a growing girl, she had many educational advantages foreshadowing the culture and capacity of her maturer years. Her father was essentially a Puritan, and the daughter's life between her mother's death and his was one of stern repression; so much so that she often felt herself a prisoner, though her jailer was intent upon her good. It is hard to realize that her early home was upon Bowling Green, then a fashionable quarter, and that later her father lived quite out of townupon the Bond Street of our time! It is evident that, after her father's death and the conventional period of mourning, the natural gayety of her disposition found such expression as was delightful to her soul, and it may not be amiss to say that there are traditions of that gayety in comparison with which Mrs. Howe's casual recollections are a painted flame. Similarly, her account of her oldest brother, Samuel Ward, the "Sam Ward" of the Washington congressional lobby, is but the faintest adumbration of the vicissitudes of his remarkable career. It is a great pity that he did not turn his literary gift to account in a veracious story of his life. So doing he might once more have rehabilitated his shattered fortunes after their last mishap.

A chapter on "Literary New York" is of such brevity as the material required. Bryant is made the founder of the Evening Post, which had been established for many years when he became an assistant editor. Of mistakes of this kind there are a good many in the book. Irving does not sustain his part very well as the leading actor in the literary drama, what with his inability to make the shortest speech and his tenminute naps over his public dinners. Mrs. Howe seems less than usually perspicacious when she writes down Major Downing's Latin "E pluribus unum, sine qua non" as pure absurdity. Barring some mixing of the genders, was it not an amusing variant of Webster's "Liberty and Union, now and for ever, one and inseparable"? Dr. John Wakefield Francis, one of the worthies of his time, was an uncle of Mrs. Howe. She relates that one morning, about four o'clock, he found his wife wrapped in shawls reading 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' by the light of a candle. Presumably she was not given to. such exercises, for he at once concluded that the book which so engrossed her must be the greatest book of the age. It was through Mrs. Howe's brother Samuel, who, after extensive travel in Europe, had returned and married a daughter of William B. Astor, that she became acquainted with

Profs. Longfellow and Felton, Charles Sumner and Dr. Howe. Longfellow's friendship with her brilliant and erratic brother ended only with the poet's life.

In 1841, Sumner and Longfellow accompanied Mrs. Howe on her first visit to the Perkins Institute for the Blind, where she met Dr. Howe, who made upon her an impression of uncommon force and reserve. He was her senior by nearly twenty years. Their marriage took place in 1843, and shortly after the wedding they went to Europe, accompanied by Horace Mann, Dr. Howe's best friend, and his young wife. They saw all the famous people, from Fanny Elssler to Carlyle, who characterized Sumner as "a vera dull man." Mann, whose sense of humor was defective, found the visit to Carlyle very disappointing, but Mrs. Howe was satisfied. A story is told of Dickens, with whom the Howes dined in Forster's chambers, which leaves us to determine for ourselves whether he was considerably illmannered or a little irresponsible. Mrs. Howe was so indiscreet as to call her husband "darling." "Thereupon Dickens slid down to the floor, and, lying on his back, held up one of his small feet, quivering with pretended emotion. 'Did she call him "darling"? he cried." The grave of Sir Walter Scott is fixed at Abbotsford, a slip of topographical association. A visit to Miss Edgeworth proved a pleasant one, but that to Wordsworth was one of the deadest failures imaginable. Wordsworth had lost heavily in American securities, and the conversation was rigidly confined to this subject, the whole family engaging. In Rome they met George Combe, the phrenologist, and it is inexpressibly funny to read of him and Dr. Howe, who was one of Combe's perverts, going round the great sculpture hall of the Vatican testing the heads by their theories, and finding that of the colossal Zeus quite orthodox in its proportions. Florence Nightingale is represented as getting her initiative in hospital philanthropy from Dr. Howe. There is a story current, we believe, which gives the honor to another person; but several may have contributed each a separate impulse to the making of her choice.

The transition is a delightful one from Mrs. Howe's European experiences, social and æsthetic, to her "First Years in Boston." We cannot but believe that she exaggerates the influence of Germany in the production of New England Transcendentalism. Largely indigenous, its ingrafted stocks were English (Coleridge), Scotch (Carlyle), and French (Cousin and Jouffroy) to a much greater extent than they were German. Particularly interesting are Mrs. Howe's impressions of Theodore Parker. They are a distinct addition to what has been published heretofore, and are confirmatory of the best that has been written in Theodore Parker's praise. Mrs. Howe honors herself unconsciously in so honoring the great heresiarch with her warm appreciation. It took courage for a woman in good society to go and hear him preach. One saint asked another what Mrs. Howe was expecting to get from him. "Atheism," the answer. "Not atheism but a theism," commented Mrs. Howe. At one of Parker's Sunday evenings she met Garrison. She had an ill opinion of him, but "found him gentle and unassuming in manner, with a pleasant voice, a benevolent countenance, and a sort of glory of sin

was

cerity in his ways and words." Her husband was equally surprised and pleased to find her singing from the same hymn-book with Garrison before the company broke up. She makes the common mistake about Phillips's Lovejoy speech in Faneuil Hall-that it was his first anti-slavery speech.

Mrs. Howe met Parker in Rome in 1844, and an intimate acquaintance only increased her admiration. Her first child was born in Rome, and Parker baptized her with the usual formula. It was probably one of his last offices of this kind. In 1852 she heard his great sermon upon Daniel Webster, and lost her omnibus for South Boston, the sermon was so long. Replying to the family impatience, she said, "Let no one find fault! I have heard the greatest thing that I shall ever hear!" Of Parker's public prayer she writes that "no rite of public worship, not even the splendid Easter service in St. Peter's, Rome," impressed her so deeply.

A second visit to Europe resulted in experiences very similar to those enjoyed upon the first. Returning to Boston in 1851, she found that Sumner had been elected to the United States Senate, displacing "a popular idol." The epithet seems too strong for Winthrop, and in its connection makes us wonder if Mrs. Howe was thinking of Webster as Sumner's competitor. Moreover, she applies the same epithet directly to Webster in another place, where she is speaking of Sumner's election. Of the latter she writes with genuine admiration, but with a keen sense of his lack of humor and some other limitations. His "fiery utterances" contrasted "strongly with the usual mildness of his disposition."

There are delightful pages about the astonishing Count Gurowski, one of the most trying of all the exiles who made large demands upon the patience and the generosity of the Boston philanthropists. In 1859, Dr. and Mrs. Howe accompanied Parker on that voyage to the West Indies from which he never returned.

It is a striking situation when we find Dr. Howe, on his way back, visiting Charleston, S. C., and vicinity, as the guest of the Hamptons, Gen. Wade Hampton among them. This was certainly a ticklish business, considering that Dr. Howe was at this time one of a committee of six engaging with John Brown in his enterprise for the invasion of Virginia. One would hardly gather from Mrs. Howe's account of John Brown that her husband's relation to him was so intimate.

Mrs. Howe's recollections of Gov. Andrew, James Freeman Clarke, and many others, will be found very interesting. It was Dr. Clarke who instigated her to write the "Battle Hymn of the Republic." A facsimile of the first draft of this poem is given, with many excellent portrait illustrations. In the account of Thomas Gold Appleton there is nothing that justifies his reputation for wit and humor; but there is one brutal retort of his on Samuel Longfellow which is suggestive of the truth that your thorough-paced man of the world is almost always sound in his conventional piety.

At this point the 'Reminiscences' broke off in the Atlantic. Here there are 170 additional pages, over which, with their recollections of "A Woman's Peace Crusade," "The Woman Suffrage Movement," "Certain Clubs," and other matters, we would gladly linger, but must not. What is certain is that Mrs. Howe has written a very pleasant book, and one that will add

to the multitude of her friends wherever it is read.

Russia on the Pacific, and the Siberian Railway. By Vladimir. London: Low, Marston & Co.; New York: Scribners. 1899.

The history of Russian expansion in Asia certainly deserves study now that the rich possibilities of Siberia are beginning to obtain recognition. We therefore welcome the work before us. It well repays reading, even if we might have been spared most of the first and fourth chapters, as there are plenty of short sketches of Russian history already. Comparison is at once suggested with Krausse's 'Russia in Asia,' which appeared at about the same time. In spite of the fact that Vladimir's work is much the slighter, being based on far fewer authorities and being less comprehensive (it does not cover the Caucasus or Central Asia), besides having fewer maps and fewer documents in the appendix, it is still much the better of the two. Krausse's bulky volume is stuffed with declamation and worn-out Russophobe phrases. Every step is ascribed to Muscovite wiles and insatiable lust for dominion. Vladimir, on the other hand, though erring a little in the opposite direction of forgiving unscrupulousness when

accom

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panied by daring, offers a clear, interesting narrative of Russian progress, which has in the main been due to perfectly simple causes. When we remember that Siberia is a huge region whose geographical features make it the natural continuation of European Russia, and that it was inhabited only by a sparse population of barbaric tribes without strength or cohesion, we can that, from the day the Cossacks crossed the Urals (a barrier less formidable than the Alleghanies), Russian expansion to the Pacific was as obvious and inevitable as was our own from an opposite direction. The only real difficulties to be encountered were those of climate, wilderness, and huge distances. In overcoming these, the Russian pioneers showed a splendid courage and endurance that compare well with the history of exploration anywhere. When, however, we come to their dealings with China, the ethics of the case are not so clear, although not worse than our own in regard to Mexico. Beginning with the story of the famous expedition of Yermak in 1581, the destruction of the Tartar kingdom of Sibir and the foundation of Tobolsk, we have a story of rapid advance. In little over half a century the whole continent was traversed and the Pacific reached; twelve years later, Bering Sea was discovered by Dezhneff; in 1651 Irkutsk was founded; in 1697 Kamtchatka was conquered by Atlassoff with some seventy Cossacks; then followed the occupation of Alaska, with an attempt in 1807 to found a settlement at the north of the Columbia River; in 1812 we find a colony of Russian trappers not far from San Francisco.

In the meanwhile, further to the south. more serious obstacles had been met with. When the Russian pioneers reached the Amur, they soon came into contact, then collision, with the Chinese Empire, in the vigorous early days of the present dynasty. After some thirty years of intermittent hostilities, whose most famous episode was the heroic, though unsuccessful, defence of Albasin by four hundred and fifty men against an army of 15,000 Mantchus and Chinese

with numerous artillery, the peace of Nertchinsk in 1689 checked Russian progress in this direction for more than a century and a half. The forward movement did not begin again until the appearance on the scene of Muravieff in 1847. Undeterred by the smallness of his resources and by the narrowminded jealousy and timidity of some of his superiors, he profited boldly by the weakness of China, whose actual authority in these regions had become a mere shadow. Not only did he occupy the whole right bank of the Amur to its mouth, but also, after only six days of negotiation, he gained by the treaty of Aigun in 1858 the whole maritime province west of the Ussuri, with the harbor where Vladivostock was founded two years later. It was a wonderful if unscrupulous diplomatic triumph, though we can hardly agree to Vladimir's statement that "the terms exacted by Muravieff were very moderate." Only the existence of the Tai-ping rebellion, together with the troubles with England and France and the 'imbecility of the Chinese authorities, can explain such a result.

The ensuing pause lasted until the war between China and Japan. Meanwhile Russian America was sold to the United States, and the Trans-Siberian Railway was begun in 1891. Vladimir gives only a slight sketch of recent events, such as the occupation of Port Arthur and Russian predominance in Mantchuria. His chapter on the Siberian railway is interesting, even if it does not contain much that cannot be found elsewhere. The last chapter of all, or "Conclusion," is a trifle dithyrambic. Its burden is, "England above any other country in the world should welcome the progress of Russia." If so, so be it.

Letters of Benjamin Jowett, M.A., Master of Balliol College, Oxford. Arranged and edited by Evelyn Abbott, M.A., LL.D., and Lewis Campbell, M.A., LL.D. With portrait.

London: John Murray; New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. 1899.

This is the volume of Jowett's letters promised by the editors when they published the late Master's life. Such letters of general interest as could not there find a place are here published in groups determined by the main topics which successively or simultaneously engrossed Jowett's thoughts, such as Church Reform and the Abolition of Tests, various educational plans and reforms, European Politics, and the needs of India and Indian administration. To these groups is added one of letters on miscellaneous topics, and the volume closes with forty-odd pages of Notes and Sayings-not the least interesting of its features. The portrait, by Laugée, here reproduced, represents Jowett at the age of fifty-four, just after he became Master at Balliol, and is in many respects a better permanent record of him than either of the two given in his Life. It is a result of the workmanlike fashion in which Messrs. Abbott and Campbell have dealt with Jowett's correspondence that the interest of the present letters is not biographical. We read these pages in order to get a clearly defined picture of Jowett's views on certain leading subjects of great and permanent importance. Perhaps the letters, first printed here, on the general topic of Church Reform and the Abolition of Tests come nearest to having an interest connected with his personal career. At all