A Guide to Modern English History. By William Cory. Part II, 1830 to 1835. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Pp. 567. Price, $3.50.
The first part of this work related to the first fifteen years of the great peace. The expansion of the present volume, which includes only about a third as much time, is justified by the author, on the ground of the "excessive value of the work done for the British Commonwealth in the years now surveyed." These years, the author adds, "are full of the virtue and wisdom which make modern England supremely worthy of a student's contemplation; it seems not too much to say that they form a period of paramount importance in the history of legislation and government." The work is the composition of a sharp observer, and is marked by vigorous thought and forcible expression, and a bold, captivating style that engages the reader and holds him. Mr. Samuel R. Gardiner, who may be regarded as an expert in the specialty of English history, characterizes it as "one not very well calculated to guide those who do not know a good deal of the way already, but admirably fitted to enable those who do to test those opinions which they have sometimes too hastily formed."
Address delivered by Edward Atkinson at the Opening of the Second Annual Fair of the New England Manufacturers' and Mechanics' Institute in Boston, September, 6, 1882. Pp. 32.
The end to be subserved by such industrial exhibitions, Mr. Atkinson tells us, is to make less arduous the daily work whereby the larger part of the community earn their daily bread. The author is not one who takes a pessimist's view of life, and, although he shows that the measure of comfort that each man, woman, and child can yet enjoy, even in our prosperous land, does not exceed on an average fifty or sixty cents per day, he does not think or believe that increase of wealth is of necessity complemented by increase of poverty. Still the small minority of people who can become possessors of capital in any large measure must justify the leisure which they or their fathers have earned, by the use which they make of the time and means at their disposal. After showing how it is possible for our railroad kings to put money in our pockets while amassing fortunes themselves, he compares our happy lot with the unfortunate condition, from an economic point of view, of those countries that are burdened by huge standing armies, and where the quantity produced, although relatively less, must be divided among a greater number. The advantages of developing the hand and brain together are then referred to. The last man or woman whom you desire to dis. charge from the works which you control, when the times are hard, is the one earning the most for himself or herself; the first to be discharged is the unfortunate one whose hand and brain have not been developed together, and who can, in hard times, no longer render you a service, even if paid a sum barely sufficient to support life. "Owing to the great natural, social, and political advantages that we enjoy, the wages of labor and the remuneration of capital must be greater in proportion to the effort used than in any other section of the world's surface; and these facts prove that the cost of production is less in ratio to product than it can be anywhere else."
Although intended for delivery before a limited audience on a particular occasion, the address is of such general interest as to deserve a wide circulation.
Contributions to Mineralogy. By F. A. Genth. Read before the American Philosophical Society, August 18, 1882.
This pamphlet of twenty-four finely printed pages represents a large amount of actual labor, and contains several important contributions to science, in the form of analyses and observations on altered minerals. That one mineral should be gradually changed, particle by particle, molecule by molecule, into a different mineral having other chemical and physical properties, is a curious and interesting phenomenon, worthy the study of such a chemist as Professor Genth. The first case described is the alteration of corundum, in Madison County, North Carolina; it is found partially altered to a massive greenish-black spinel; in Towns County, Georgia, a pink corundum is found surrounded by greenish-white, cleavable zoisite; an interesting occurrence of the alteration of corundum into a feldspar is near Media, Pennsylvania, at the "Black--
