life, and the successive steps by which the diversified forms of animals are developed, and insists upon the necessity of following the history of an animal through all its phases before its true place in the grand plan can be determined.  He discusses the permanence of species, and the limits of their variation, which he illustrates more especially by the growth of corals, and most emphatically expresses his dissent from the startling development-doctrines of Darwin.  But it would be fruitless to attempt an abstract of the numerous truths he has alluded to, and the methods by which such truths are to be sought.  It is to these truths, in contradistinction to the mere study and description of species, and the building up of systems on external characters alone, that he hopes to direct attention.  Those comprehensive truths are few.  Agassiz tells us, that, after a whole life devoted to the study of Nature, a simple sentence may express all he himself has done:  “I have shown that there is a correspondence between the succession of fishes in geological times and the different stages of their growth in the egg,—­this is all.”  Though this is by no means the limit of his claim so modestly expressed, yet that was a grand generalization, and, like the great doctrine of gravitation, and the demonstration by Cuvier of the existence of races of animals and plants on the globe anterior to those now existing, it proves to be of almost indefinite application, and, like those doctrines, has revolutionized science.

The peculiar scientific views here presented this is no place to criticize.  But we may say that to every student of liberal culture this work is essential.  Every teacher’s table and every school-library should be furnished with it.

Hannah Thurston:  A Story of American Life.  By BAYARD TAYLOR.  New York:  G.P.  Putnam.

Mr. Bayard Taylor evidently does not subscribe to the theory which “Friends in Council” attributes to a large class:  “that men cannot excel in more things than one; and that, if they can, they had better be quiet about it.”  Having already achieved a reputation as a traveller, a poet, and a secretary to a foreign legation, he now enters the lists with the novelists, who must look well to their laurels, if they would not have them snatched from their brows by this new-comer.

The book is called “A Story of American Life.”  It is American life, just as the statue of the Venus de’ Medici or the Apollo Belvedere is the representation of the human figure.  No Athenian belle, no Delphic athlete, stood for those beautiful shapes; but the nose was modelled from one copy, the limbs from another, the brow from a third, and the result is a joy forever.  So the American life portrayed in this story is a conglomeration, and partially a caricature, of the various isms which have disturbed the strata of our social life.  That early American village should present within its outmost circle the collection