The object of Dr. Holmes’s volume is to bring physicians and the people over whom they hold dominion into sensible relations with each other.  A beautiful scorn of deception and humbug shines through his clear exposition of the facts and laws of disease.  A high sense of the duties and dignity of the medical profession animates every precept he enforces on the attention of those who are to deal with disease.  Like all the advanced thinkers of his profession, he relies, in the art of curing, more on Nature than on drugs; but in thus assisting to dispel the notion that the prescriptions either of the regular doctor or the irregular empiric possess the power to heal, he injures the quack only to aid the good physician.  The strength of the quack consists in the two-fold ignorance of the sick,—­in their ignorance of the superficial character of their common ailments, and in their ignorance of the deadly nature of their exceptional diseases.  Panaceas, seeming to cure the former, are eagerly taken for the latter; but it is well known that they do not cure in either case.  Physicians are tempted into quackery by the desire to dislodge ignorant pretenders from bedsides which it is their proper function to attend, and in ministering to sick imaginations they are too apt to pour a needless amount of nauseous medicine into sick bodies.  If people, while in health, would heed the honest advice which Dr. Holmes gives in this volume, they would force physicians to be less hypocritical in their management of them when they are ill, and they would destroy the wide-spread evil of quackery under which the world now groans.

History of Civilization in England. By HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE.  Vol.  II.  From the Second London Edition.  To which is added an Alphabetical Index.  New York:  D. Appleton & Co. 8vo.

The present volume of Mr. Buckle’s history consists of a deductive application to the history of Spain and Scotland of certain leading propositions, which, in his previous volume, he claims to have inductively established.  These are four; “1st, That the progress of mankind depends on the success with which the laws of phenomena are investigated, and on the extent to which a knowledge of those laws is diffused; 2d, That, before investigation can begin, a spirit of skepticism must arise, which, at first aiding the investigation, is afterwards aided by it; 3d, That the discoveries thus made increase the influence of intellectual truths, and diminish, relatively, not absolutely, the influence of moral truths,—­moral truths being more stationary than intellectual truths, and receiving fewer additions; 4th, That the great enemy of this movement, and therefore the great enemy of civilization, is the protective spirit, or the notion that the good of society depends on its concerns being watched over and protected by a State that teaches men what to do, and a Church which teaches them what to believe.”