To the literary reader the doubt will arise, whether the writer of this work might not have more profitably employed his time, during the last ten years, in creating thoughts than in “improving” land,—­in diffusing information than in selling milk.  As a poetic, scientific, and practical farmer, he has doubtless silenced all cynic doubts of his capacity to make four or six per cent. on the capital he invested in land; but it is plain, that, without capital, he might have made three or four times as much by the genial exercise of his literary power.  The talent exercised on his farm we must, therefore, consider from a financial point of view to have been more or less wasted.  As a “gentleman-farmer,” he might easily have repaired from his study all the losses which his trained subordinates of the garden and the field incurred from the lack of his constant superintendence.  Everything which a man of mind could want in a country-residence might have been obtained without his personal oversight of every minute detail, and the net result of the gains of the year would have been greater, if, instead of riding daily into New Haven to sell his milk, he had stayed quietly in his study to write for the magazines.  This calculation we have made from a rigid scrutiny of the figures in which the author sums up, year after year, his gains.

We have been provoked into this comparison by the evident glee with which Ik Marvel parades the results of his agricultural labors.  So earnest is he to show that a man of genius can make money by farming, that he is inclined to overlook the distinction between the work of an ordinary and that of an extraordinary mind.  Waiving this consideration, we have nothing to object to his ten years’ seclusion from literature.  That seclusion has brought him into contact with the rough realities of a farmer’s life, has enabled him personally to inspect every process of agriculture, and furnish his mind with an entirely new class of facts.  The result is a book whose merit can hardly be overpraised.  It should be in every farmer’s library, as a volume full of practical advice to aid his daily work, and full of ennobling suggestions to lift his calling into a kind of epic dignity.  As a book for the generality of readers, it far exceeds any previous work of the author in force, naturalness, and beauty, in vividness of description and richness of style, and in that indefinable element of genius which envelops the most prosaic details in an atmosphere of refinement and grace.

Methods of Study in Natural History.  By L. AGASSIZ.  Boston:  Ticknor & Fields. 12mo.

A work from the scientific storehouse of Professor Agassiz needs only to have attention called to its existence to command universal welcome.  The readers of the “Atlantic” are already in some measure familiar with its contents, being a reprint of a series of papers published in this journal; but they will be read again with double satisfaction in this continuous form.  The avowed purpose is “to give some general hints to young students as to the methods by which scientific truth has been reached.”