the Jataka tales, a great many fables of sterling significance, which, from their point and brevity, can be borne as easily as proverbs in the memory. Advancing to pupils of riper years, our author shows what can be done in adapting the Iliad, the Odyssey, and other great classics to the education of admiration, to the discrimination between motives worthy and unworthy, to the building up of lofty ideals of life. That conduct may be the better practiced as an art, we are next given an outline of morals as a science; the duties which relate to the physical life and the feelings are described and enforced; then, filial and fraternal duties receive attention; third, come the duties to all men of justice and charity; and, lastly, a word regarding the duties of citizenship.
Prof. Adler gives us this book as an outcome of fifteen years' successful work in the class-room, and he intends it to be simply an aid, not a guide, to the teacher. While the founder and leader of the ethical movement, and on fire with the ethical spirit, he is too wise a man not to see the folly of being righteous overmuch. He warns the teacher against that moral microscopy which absorbs itself in trifles, only to find strength lacking when a genuine battle has to be fought. But even strength is not everything. It is, after all, at surfaces mainly that we touch, and so we have emphasis laid on grace, on fine manners, as the true efflorescence of high character, enabling it to win where mere strength would fail. He would not have the aim of the moral teacher too much in evidence, well knowing that it is because the marksman does not point at the bull's-eye that he hits it. While a disciple of Kant and an upholder of a moral law underived from the reckoning of consequences, he is willing to give due credit to the utilitarians. Duty goes further and higher than prudence, yet for a long distance they are companions; righteousness does not work for wages, but why blink the fact that it receives goodly rewards? But, however much character in the making may be aided by prudential considerations, character in its perfection has left them far behind. Duty, at first a matter of conscious purpose, becomes confirmed as the habit of the soul, and flowers at last as impulses from which all sense of effort or calculation of gain has passed away.
On every page this book shows that it comes from a strong, judicious, and richly freighted mind. It demonstrates how the culture of conscience, supplementing and completing the culture of the intellect, can lift education to a plane where it shall address itself not to part of human nature but the whole. Its chapters have been written for the teacher; they contain counsels that every parent in the land would be the better for laying to heart.
The Electric Railway in Theory and Practice. By Oscar T. Crosby and Louis Bell. New York. The W. J. Johnston Company (limited), 1892. Pp. 400. Price, $2.50.
Among the industrial applications of electricity none have attained greater commercial importance in recent years than electric traction. Although experimental work in this field had been carried on both here and abroad for many years, it was not until the great electric revival of a dozen years ago that the subject began to have importance. Even then this form of traction did not take a commercial place comparable with the other applications of electricity. Much detail work had to be done before it could enter upon the industrial stage, and its economy and adaptability to actual service had to be demonstrated by the test of time. Up to about six years ago electric railways may be said to have progressed no further than the experimental stage, but since that time the application of electric traction to street-car service has gone on at an unexampled rate in this country, until now a large number of the cities and towns have one or more electric railways. As is usual in the practical development of a new art, many fruitless experiments had to be made and much money and time wasted. It was early recognized that the method of operation which promised the largest measure of success was that in which the current was conveyed to the moving car by means of a circuit carried along the line, and connection with which was made by some sort of elastic contact carried by the car. But it was not demonstrated until after many trials in just what manner this could be done to provide a reliable and economical service. Attempts were made to use the rails as the
