In the hero of the story and his relations to the heroine, with occasional questionable traits, we find often a generosity, delicacy, and devotion which give promise of good. A man who can conceive a character so much above the common level, where the common level has always been low, cannot fail by continued observation and candid thinking to rise still higher. Frequently already, seeming hardly to be conscious of it, he impinges upon a far-reaching, deep-lying, but generally unrecognized truth. When men shall have come to study the nature of woman, instead of haranguing about her duties, a great point will have been gained.
The blemishes which we have pointed out, and others which we have not pointed out, are only blemishes, and chiefly upon the surface. They mar, but they do not vitiate.
The limits of a magazine will not admit that adequate analysis and criticism which the ability of the book, both in point of subject and treatment, deserves. We have only space to say, that, making every allowance for every fault, it has the merit of being a pioneer, and an able pioneer, in a tract which has been hitherto, so far as we know, unbroken wilderness. Its author has not solved the problem,—he does not even understand all its conditions; but he is travelling in the direction of the true solution: and he offers us the rare, we had almost said the solitary, spectacle of a man and an opponent bringing to the discussion of the “Woman’s-Rights question” an appreciable degree of sense, justice, and moral dignity.
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Manual of Instructions for Military Surgeons, on the Examination of Recruits and Discharge of Soldiers. With an Appendix, containing the Official Regulations of the Provost-Marshal-General’s Bureau, and those for the Formation of the Invalid Corps, etc. Prepared at the Request of the U.S. Sanitary Commission. By John Ordronaux, M.D., Professor of Medical Jurisprudence in Columbia College, New York. New York. D. Van Nostrand. 12mo. pp. 238. $1.50.