the sources of plant-food and how it is obtained. This is the most purely scientific part, as all the explanations depend upon chemistry. The author then takes up the questions of the improvement of soils, the use of manures, mineral fertilizers, rotation of crops, and the selection and care of livestock. This is the more practical portion of the book, and is full of well-digested information which should be got early into the heads of farmers' boys. There is an appendix describing a few simple experiments, and then the customary questions to aid the teacher in the recitations.
Summer-Land Sketches, or Rambles in the Backwoods of Mexico and Central America. By Felix L. Oswald. With numerous Illustrations. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. Pp. 425. Price, $3.
This is a book of travel, adventure, and observation in a wild and picturesque region, upon which pen and pencil have been hitherto but little employed. It is besides a scholarly study of the scenery, the natural objects, the art-works, and the habits and characters of the people that were met with, and it is full of acute reflections and an instructive philosophy thoroughly imbued with the modern scientific spirit. Its style is, moreover, vivid, racy, crisp, and lively, so that altogether the work may be commended to the reader as fresh, original, brilliant, and solid.
Dr. Oswald was stationed at Medellin, near Vera Cruz, in 1867, as director of a military lazaretto. Transferred afterward to the Vera Cruz City Dispensary, he lost his health, and, having got a notion that the mountains of Mexico have great sanitary claims, he resolved to go there and if possible reëstablish his constitution. He rambled about for several years, and this volume is one of the results of his experience. Dr. Oswald has very decided views in regard to some of the evil tendencies of civilization, and was very happy in the great region that has not yet been invaded by the destructive agencies of civilized life.
The following extract from his introduction, shadowing forth this idea, explains the production of the book, and illustrates the characteristics of the author's writing:
We vaunt our proficiency in the art of subjugating Nature, but in the New World the same ambition has led to a very dear-bought victory which the countries of the East have paid with the loss of their manhood; their wild woodlands have been tamed into deserts, and their wild freemen into slaves; the curse of the blighted land has recoiled upon its devastators. In our eagerness to wrest the scepter from our Mother Earth, we have invaded her domain with fire and sword, and instead of increasing the interest of our heritage we have devoured the principal; the brilliant progress of the vain god of earth la tracked by a lengthening shadow—the day-star of our empire is approaching the western horizon.
Where shall it end? Mold, sandy loam, and sand, is Liebig's degeneration scale of treeless countries; the American soil may pass through the same phases, and what then? Will the sunset in the West be followed by a new Eastern sunrise? Shall Asia, the mother of religions, give birth to an earth-regenerating Messiah, whose gospel shall teach us to recognize the physical laws of God? Or shall the gloaming fade into the night of the Buddhistic Nirvana, the final extinction of organic life on this planet? It is not much of a consolation to think that in the latter case the nations of the higher latitudes might count upon a protracted twilight. The westward spread of the land-blight will drive the famished millions of the Old World upon our remaining woodlands, but the resources of the last oasis will probably be husbanded with Scotch canniness and Prussian systematism, and before we share the fate of the Eastern nations we may see the dawn of the bureaucratic millennium, when all our fields shall be fenced in with brick walls, all rivers with irrigation-dikes, and all functions of our domestic life with official laws and by-laws. My trust in the eternal mercy of Providence lets me expect another deluge before that time; but the recuperative agencies of unaided Nature seem powerless against the greatest of all earthly evils. National and territorial marasmus are incurable diseases; the historical records of the Eastern Continents, at least, prove nothing to the contrary. The coast-lands of the Mediterranean were the pleasure gardens of the Juventus Mundi, the Elysian Fields whose inhabitants celebrated life as a festival; and now? Spain, southern Italy, Turkey, Greece, and Persia have been wasted to a shadow of their former self; ghouls and afrits