The attractiveness and charm which everybody seems to have found in him had perhaps the same origin.  It does not appear that his nature was peculiarly sympathetic, that it was through any unusual flow and warmth of feeling toward others that he so quickly became the object of their attachment or regard.  Of course, we do not intend to intimate that he was deficient in strength of affection or in the least degree cold or unresponsive.  But his “magnetism,” to use the current word, lay in the ardor and singleness of his devotion to science, not as an abstraction, but as a potent agency in civilization, in the union of elevation with enthusiasm, in an openness that seemed to reveal everything, yet nothing that should have been hidden.  Hence this biography, little as it deals with purely personal matters, awakens an interest of precisely the same kind as that which the living Agassiz was accustomed to excite.  For the student of comparative zoology or of glacial action all that is here told about these subjects can have only an historical value.  But no reader can follow the successive steps of a career that was always in the truest sense upward without being touched by that inspiring influence which it constantly diffused, and which Americans, above all others, have reason to hold in grateful remembrance.

Illustrated Books.

“The Sermon on the Mount.”  Boston:  Roberts Brothers.

“Poems of Nature.”  By John Greenleaf Whittier.  Illustrated from Nature by Elbridge Kingsley.  Boston and New York:  Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

“Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.”  A Romaunt.  By Lord Byron.  Boston:  Ticknor & Co.

“The Last Leaf.”  Poem.  By Oliver Wendell Holmes.  Illustrated by George Wharton Edwards and F. Hopkinson Smith.  Boston:  Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

“Pepper and Salt; or, Seasoning for Young Folks.”  Prepared by Howard Pyle.  New York:  Harper & Brothers.

“Davy the Goblin; or, What Followed Reading ’Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,’” By Charles E. Carryl.  Boston; Ticknor & Co.

“Bric-a-Brac Stories.”  By Mrs. Burton Harrison.  Illustrated by Walter Crane.  New York:  Charles Scribner’s Sons.

“Rudder Grange.”  By Frank R. Stockton.  Illustrated by A.B.  Frost.  New York:  Charles Scribner’s Sons.

In turning over the pictorial books of the season one experiences a genuine pleasure in coming upon this illustrated edition of “The Sermon on the Mount,” which belongs to a high order of merit from its satisfactory interpretation of the subject and the beauty of its general design and careful detail.  It is, of course, a modern performance, and nothing is more characteristic of most modern art than that it does consciously, from reminiscence and with a reaching after certain effects, what was once done simply, intuitively, and from the urgency of poetic feeling.  A great difference must naturally exist not only in the outward mode but in the spirit of