cation to national interests. Dr. Harris has chosen an excellent tutor for them in M. Fouillée, an eminent scholar and one of the race in which the national spirit is notably strong. Assuming that each nation has a continuity of character, mind, habits, and aptitudes which forms an organic heredity and identity persisting from age to age, the author inquires how education can be made to assist in perfecting this national nature. After a word on the importance of physical education he states that the chief objects of intellectual education should be—first, the moral; second, the beautiful; and last, the true. The reader should be cautioned against accepting fully M. Fouillée's representation of the effects of the study of science. In various places, and especially in the chapters on the Scientific Humanities, he denounces the present teaching of science as if it actually represented this field of knowledge at its best, and declares that science has been weighed and found wanting. He ignores the fact that science has been taught often by unsympathetic teachers, without suitable materials, and for a very short period at all. In his chapters on the Classical Humanities he is much more sympathetic, recommending these subjects as the very best means of fostering a national spirit. He criticises severely what is known in France as a modern education, and proposes a reformed system of secondary training which should embrace these studies: 1, the literature of the mother country; 2, Latin literature; 3, general history; 4, the elements of mathematics and physics. Where diversity arises, it should be in only the following special subjects: Greek, secondary science subjects with applied science, and modern languages. In conclusion, he maintains that all education will prove defective from the national standpoint unless it includes moral and social science, and unless its several parts are unified by philosophy. Programmes illustrating the author's views are given in an appendix.
A Contribution to our Knowledge of Seedlings. By the Right Hon. Sir John Lubbock, Bart. New York: D. Appleton & Co. In two volumes. Price, $10.
The results of a wide-reaching botanical research are embodied in these two substantial and copiously illustrated volumes. The subject of this research is the forms of cotyledons, which not only differ greatly in different plants but are generally much different from the forms of the ordinary leaves in the same plant. Some cotyledons are broad, others narrow; those of the mustard are kidney-shaped, of the cress three-lobed, of the beech fan-shaped, of the sycamore shaped almost like a knife-blade, of Eschscholtzia divided like a hay-fork, of the bean or acorn thick and fleshy. The shape of the seed • seems to have an influence on the shape of J| the cotyledons. Where the cotyledons are narrow and lie straight in a long, narrow seed, the relation is simple, but such cases are few. Often narrow cotyledons are found coiled in orbicular seeds. In many broad seeds we find two fleshy cotyledons laid face to face, and occupying almost the whole of the seed. In the nearly spherical radish seed the cotyledons are laid face to face and then folded along the middle. In other species one cotyledon is larger than the other, or the halves of each cotyledon are unequal; still other cotyledons are lobed, emarginate, aurieled, etc., and for all of these features the author has found probable causes in the shape of the seed or the way in which the cotyledons are packed within it. A general statement of these points occupies the early part of the first volume, while the rest of the work is devoted to descriptions of the seedlings in a large number of genera. In procuring the seedlings for these descriptions the author has been permitted to make large use of the resources of Kew Gardens. A valuable feature of the work is the carefully drawn illustrations of seedlings, sections of seeds, etc., of which there are six hundred and eighty-four. An index and a bibliography are appended.
The Theory of Wages and its Application. By Herhert M. Thompson. London and New York: Macmillan & Co. Pp. 140. Price, $1.
This is a piece of close and clearly expressed reasoning upon one of the great problems of political economy. The author says that his economic statements are, for the most part, those accepted by the economists of to-day. These statements he sets forth in the first chapter, and upon them he bases the proposition that "the universal product
