n: Interstate Publishing Company. Pp. 109, with Plates. Price, 60 cents.
This is a vivid reproduction, from memory, of days and scenes and customs that have passed away, and live only in the traditions of those who are now fathers and mothers. It brings before us the New England country school-house of forty or fifty years ago, with the children plainly dressed, and most of them barefooted. The story can not fail to be pleasing to those who would recall the days when they were children, and to those who would enjoy a representation of what their parents did and saw in the school.
The Great Conspiracy; its Origin and History. By John A. Logan. New York: A. E. Hart & Co. Pp. 810.
This book will attract attention on account of the author's prominence in the politics of the day, and will particularly interest those who recollect his activity as a soldier of the Union during the war of the rebellion. In preparing the book it has been his aim, he says, "to present in it, with historical accuracy, authentic facts; to be fair and impartial in grouping them; and to be true and just in the conclusions necessarily drawn from them. While thus striving to be accurate, fair, and just, he has not thought it his duty to mince words, nor to refrain from 'calling things by their right names'; neither has he sought to curry favor, in any quarter, by fulsome adulation on the one side, nor undue denunciation on the other, either of the living or of the dead"; in treating the subject, "he has conscientiously dealt with it, throughout, in the clear and penetrating light of the voluminous records so readily accessible at the seat of our national government. So far as was practicable, he has endeavored to allow the chief characters in that conspiracy, as well as the Union leaders,. . . to speak for themselves, and thus, while securing their own proper places in history, by a process of self-adjustment, as it were, themselves to write down that history in their own language." Nevertheless, the style of the book is warm; and many of the thoughts and expressions seem more appropriate to a period that survives only in history than to the present, when men's thoughts are running in other channels, and their controversies are on other questions than those that engaged exclusive attention twenty years ago.
Smithsonian Accounts of Progress in 1885. Washington: Government Printing-Office.
Geography. By J. King Goodrich. Pp. 36.—Mr. Goodrich has given a very readable account of the year's work in geography, which others than special students of the subject will be interested in. Beginning with "general notes" relating to the condition and growth of geographical knowledge as a whole, he arranges his review under the special headings of the several regions which have been fields of geographical research, with accounts of the work done in each.
Chemistry. By Professor H. Carrington Bolton. Pp. 50. This account, though short, gives the record of a busy year's work, in which, while no startling discoveries have been made, a great deal has been done in the study of important questions relative to the nature of the chemical radicals, their relations to one another, and their reactions.
Vulcanology and Seismology. By Charles G. Rockwood, Jr. Pp. 23.—The study of this branch is still devoted largely to individual manifestations, with much inquiry for laws and causes, but few definite general conclusions. It is given here as one of the conclusions of Verbeck's investigation of the great Krakatoa eruption, that that volcano lies at the intersection of three fissures of the earth's crust, and the earthquake of September 1, 1880, probably affected the Sunda fissure and facilitated the entrance of greater quantities of water to the volcanic furnace beneath. Hence the remote causes of the outburst of 1883.
Physics. By Professor George F. Barker. Pp. 60.—Besides the results in general physics, Professor Barker mentions the studies that have been made in the physics of liquids and gases, light, acoustics, and electricity, and special applications.
Mineralogy. By Professor