particulars of his policy on the eve of the re- not merely to ascertain the measure of the bellion, and his construction of the limitation responsibility of a person to the law as the of his constitutional powers, more especially agent of society, but to discover the precise with reference to the coercion of a State (how- condition of his mental health, so as to avert ever correct the construction may have been), mental disease, to prevent it when incipient was a cruel impediment; but that neither of from germinating into a more fully developed these precipitated the war by a single hour, nor form, to mitigate it in its several stages, or that any other construction of his powers as when it shall have reached serious proporPresident than that which restrained him, as tions, and to be prepared for its intelligent it subsequently restrained Mr. Lincoln, from and beneficent treatment in each and all of prompt and decisive offensive action, would its manifestations. Holding this medical purhave been effectual to nip the rebellion in the pose strictly in view, Dr. Hammond points out bud and avert the war, seems now to be clearly the distinguishing features and marks of difestablished by the facts adduced by Mr. Curtis. ference between legal insanity and medical inThat Mr. Curtis's biography will excite much sanity, and as the result of the comparison and controversy pro and con is inevitable; but for- contrast he insists that they are two very dif tunately the present is a most favorable junc-ferent things, and that the two standards can ture for it to take place. "Time, the healer," | never and ought never to be the same. His has cured many of the exasperations that once reasoning, briefly stated, is that the law estabinflamed our judgments, and the hour is pro-lishes an arbitrary and unscientific line, and pitious for a calm and searching investigation of the facts underlying a most interesting and momentous episode in our history. If injustice has been done to Mr. Buchanan, the American people are generous enough to acknowledge and make reparation for it.

declares that every act performed on one side of this line is the act of a sane mind, while all acts done on the other side result from insane minds. This line may fluctuate from day to day with the caprice of legislators, and in fact does vary widely, not only in different countries, but in different States of our own country. In the State of New York it is now drawn at the knowledge of right and wrong, and this Dr. Hammond considers as, on the

regard for the safety of society will permit to be made. But he declares that this line is absolutely untenable from the point of view of the physician, who knows that it is not a medical line, and that there are thousands of lunatics insane enough to believe themselves to be Julius Cæsars, and yet sane enough to know that a particular act is contrary to law, and to be fully aware of its nature and consequences. So that from the medical standpoint there is no middle ground between san

IF the reader of Dr. Hammond's Treatise on Insanity shall be able to escape the conviction that he is himself insane, he will at least be forced to exclaim with Faulconbridge, in Shak-whole, about as correct a legal line as a due speare's King John, that this is "a mad world." Viewing the subject of insanity from the standpoint of the medical rather than of the legal practitioner, Dr. Hammond gives an application to the term far transcending that in ordinary use. In his opinion, formed after close experimental study, the term "insanity" or "mental aberration" has hitherto been applied in altogether too limited and illogical a manner to those only who at some time or other present certain marked symptoms, which they can not avoid exhibiting, and which are suffi-ity and insanity; but the line of demarkation cient to indicate to the world that they are not in their right mind. And further, starting from the assumption that the brain is the seat of the mind, or, in other words, that the mind is nothing more than the result of cerebral action, he regards all normal mental phenomena as the result of the action of a healthy brain, and all abnormal manifestations of mind as the result of the functionation of a diseased or deranged brain, and thereupon he concludes that all these latter should be included under the designation of "insanity" as properly as the former are embraced under the term sanity," since there can be no middle ground; for the brain is either in a healthy or in an unhealthy condition—if healthy, the product of its action being "sanity," and if unhealthy, "insanity." In thus expanding the meaning and application of the term "insanity," Dr. Hammond has the distinctive object in view,

A Treatise on Insanity in its Medical Relations. By WILLIAM A. HAMMOND, M.D., etc. 8vo, pp. 707. New York: D. Appleton and Co.

is sharply drawn, and it is but a step from one territory to the other. Dr. Hammond further emphasizes this view by the startling statement that a large proportion of the population of every civilized community is composed of individuals whose insanity is known only to themselves, and perhaps to some who are in intimate social relations with them, who have lost none of their rights, privileges, or responsibilities as citizens, who transact their business with fidelity and accuracy, and yet who are as truly insane, though in a less degree, as the most furious maniac, and to many of whom life is a burden they would willingly throw off if death concerned them alone, for they are painfully conscious of their condition, and morbidly apprehensive in regard to the future. Finally, Dr. Hammond enunciates the still more startling proposition that there are few people who have not at some time or other been medically insane, since he considers it an undoubted fact that a disordered mind is just as surely the result of a disordered brain as dyspepsia is of a

deranged stomach, that a scarcely appreciable | tions on the causes of insanity, its prognosis, increase or diminution of the blood supply to diagnosis, pathology, morbid anatomy, and the brain will lead as surely to mental derange-treatment—the last-mentioned 'including a ment of some kind as an apparently insignifi- discussion of the questions whether insane cant change of the muscular tissue of the heart persons should be treated at home or in an to fat will lead to a derangement of the circu- asylum, and if so, when; and a consideration lation, and that in the one case there may be a of the problems connected with their mechanhallucination, a delusion, a morbid impulse, or ical, moral, hygienic, and medicinal treatment. a paralysis of the will, just as in the other there While the work will be highly prized by the may be an intermittent pulse, a vertigo, or a medical profession for its large and authentic fainting fit. For these reasons Dr. Hammond contributions of specific technical knowledge is of the opinion that the time has arrived as to the nature, seat, causes, diagnosis, progwhen the horror of the word "insanity” should nosis, pathology, clinics, and treatment of inbe dissipated, and the facts just recited should sanity in all its forms, it is yet one that laybe recognized and acted upon. And to this men may easily read with great advantage, if end he has prepared his treatise, and offers it with painful interest, for its practical counsels as a systematic attempt to classify and ana- and suggestions, and for its exhaustive historlyze some of those states of mental aberra- | ical and analytical outline of insanity, and of tion which he thinks must properly be classi- its inherent and external incitements. fied as insanities, though not popularly so esteemed, to point out their clinical features, MR. S. M. BURNHAM has rendered a substanand to indicate the treatment proper for them. tial service to workers in marble, and to noviAs a necessary preliminary to the determina- tiates in the science of geology as well, by a tion of what states of mental aberration should practical digest of the History and Uses of Limebe classed as insanities, Dr. Hammond devotes stones and Marbles. Although it is not and nearly a third of his voluminous treatise to a makes no pretensions to be considered a treastatement of the general principles of the tise on geology intended for scientific readers physiology and pathology of the human mind, as such, and makes no claims to original inincluding an investigation of the nature and vestigations, nor advances any new and interseat of the mind and its various divisions, and esting geological theories, nevertheless as an of the mental and physical conditions--such as introduction to the substantive object which eccentricity, idiosyncrasy, genius, habit, tem- he had in view in its preparation, and as being perament, constitution, hereditary tendency, essential to an intelligent comprehension of age, sex, race--which are inherent in the indi- the scientific and historical facts connected vidual, and influence the action of the mind. with the part played in the world by the vaAnd in this connection-because a very consid-rious limestone formations, its author has felt erable proportion of cases of mental derangement have their origin in aberrations of some one or other of the instincts, or that principle of life which is present in all organic beings from the highest to the lowest; and also because a knowledge of the physiology and pathology of the function of sleep and its derangements should form the groundwork of any study of insanity, for the reason that it is in aberrations of sleep that the first indications of aberrations of mind are often revealed-Dr. Hammond further premises his specific description of medical insanity, and his account of the methods for its treatment, by an elaborate disquisition on instinct, its na-ly scientific preliminaries are briefly disposed ture and seat, the analogies that exist between it and reason, and the differences that distinguish them from each other, and its influence upon the mind, and by several highly interesting chapters on sleep, its causes, the necessity for it, its physical phenomena, the state of the mind during its continuance, and on the physiology and psychology of dreams. The remainder of this important work is strictly confined to the classification and description of the different forms of insanity; to a minute examination of the history of each, under the heads of perceptional, intellectual, emotional, volitional, compound, and constitutional insanities; and to a series of elaborate disserta

that it was incumbent upon him to give at the ontset a brief general outline of the different classes of limestones; to state the principles that governed men of science in their classification; to describe and classify the various fossils, or vestiges of organic life, to which they owe their origin; to define their various localities; to specify their varieties of color and structure, with the causes of each; and to summarize the conclusions of science with reference to their geological age, including a succinct statement of the methods which have been resorted to by geologists for determining the age of rocks generally. These more strict

of, however, and with only slight recourse to technical terms; and when these are necessary they are accompanied by such simple and lucid explanations as enable the unscientific reader to understand the elementary facts of geology without reference to a text-book. The main purpose of this successful and useful compilation is the purely practical one of presenting the facts and speculations of original explorers and writers, so selected and arranged as to illustrate the value of limestones in some departments of geology, but more especially

3 History and Uses of Limestones and Marbles. By S. M. BURNHAM. With Forty-eight Chromo-Lithographs. 8vo, pp. 392. Boston: S. E. Cassino and Co.

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the history of their use and application in the its origin in gifts of a rare order, in au intelmechanic and fine arts, and the part they have lect of exceeding subtlety and mobility, and borne in civilization. The general view of perceptive powers of singular fineness and deltheir nature, origin, and formation, and of the icacy, has exhibited itself in his writings hithpart they have played in the structure of the erto as a casual excrescence, and its unusual earth, to which we have already adverted, pre- prominence in these lectures may be ascribed pares the reader for a more specific descrip- to the circumstance that they were hastily tion of them as they are found dispersed over prepared for oral delivery before a youthful particular geographical divisions, and of the auditory, and have been published without uses to which they are severally adapted, and the severe review to which they would doubtto which they have been or are susceptible of less have been subjected by the author if his being applied by the sculptor or the architect life had been prolonged. The lectures are a for ornamentation and embellishment, for de- series of studies in which it is proposed, first, fense and habitation, and generally for the to inquire what is that special relation of the arts and industries of the world. Beginning novel to man in modern times by virtue of with an account of the limestone areas of the which it has become a permanent literary United States, which he considers under the form, and secondly, to illustrate this abstract three general divisions of the Atlantic region, inquiry by some concrete readings in and critthe Mississippi basin, and the Pacific slope, ical analyses of modern novels. In prosecuMr. Burnham enters upon a short but minute ting this inquiry, which he most appropriatedescription of every form of limestone that is ly designates as "abstract," Mr. Lanier dwells to be found in the several States and Territo- at much length, and with great variety and ries, in which he sets forth the extent, nature, subtlety of illustration and comparison, upon and quality of the formation in each, and its the enormous growth in the personality of special adaptedness for purposes of art or use- man, which our time reveals, since the time fulness; and afterward he extends his descrip- of Eschylus and other ancient writers, and tive and analytical survey, in like manner, to he then elaborately discusses the proposition, every country in which limestone deposits ex- which he emphasizes as a remarkable and sugist. The volume is freely illustrated by richly gestive fact, that music, the novel, and physcolored chromo-lithographs in fac-simile of the ical science all had their rise at the same time, most remarkable, the most beautiful, and the as the result of this increased personality, his most useful varieties, and it is diversified conclusion being that their simultaneous birth throughout with interesting historical and at the Renaissance, before which they had "no artistic facts and allusions bearing upon the fixed or developable existence," proves that working and use of limestones and marbles, in the spirit of man had now for the first time, as all parts of the ancient and modern world, for the fruit of the travail of ages, established for all the purposes to which they have been ap- himself three new, great, and distinctive perplied by the ingenuity of man for the gratifi- | sonal relations-a new and perfectly clear percation of his sense of the beautiful, or in obe-sonal relation with physical nature, achieved dience to the demands of utility or necessity. through the agency of modern science; a new The four closing chapters of the work are ap-relation to the infinite and unknown, finding propriately devoted to a historical review of some interesting extant facts relative to antique marbles, alabasters, serpentines, basalts, granites, and porphyries, antique stones and works of art in modern Rome, and antique stones used to decorate Roman churches.

NOTWITHSTANDING the occasional inequalities and incompletenesses by which they are marred, the twelve lectures on The English Novel delivered by the late Sidney Lanier at Johns Hopkins University in the spring and winter of 1881, and now collected and published in a posthumous volume, are deserving of an honorable place among the best examples of recent literary criticism and analysis. One of Mr. Lanier's chief defects was a tendency to indulge in ingenious but fine-spun speculations, which sometimes degenerated into vagaries and extravagances, and led him into a labyrinth of technical abstraction and crotchety philosophizing. But this defect, which had

The English Novel, and the Principle of its Develop ment. By SIDNEY LANIER. 12mo, pp. 293. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

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expression in modern music; and a new and greatly expanded relation to our fellow-man, voiced by the modern novel. After a prolonged and exceedingly abstruse historical and critical survey, in the course of which there are many ingenious, many fanciful, and many suggestive digressions-for example, upon the rhythmical origin of speech, upon the alleged probability that science is destined ultimately to destroy poetry, novel-writing, and imaginative work generally, and in refutation of the crude theories of imaginative art advanced by Walt Whitman and Emile Zola-Mr. Lanier devotes the remainder of his lectures to an elaborate exemplification of the theory that the increase of personality, or the growth of the feeling of a direct personal relation to each individual, high or low, which he demonstrates to have been going on in the world, has brought about such complexities of relation that the older forms of expression were inadequate to them, and necessarily the wonderfully free and elastic form of the modern novel has been developed out of the more rigid Greek drama through the transition form of the Elizabethan

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account teeming with solid information, occasionally alleviated by mirth-provoking oddities of thought and expression, is given by Mr. Clemens of what he denominates the "historical history" of the river, including a brief outline of its discovery, and a glance at its first slumbrous epoch, prelusive to a series of animated sketches of its second more wideawake epoch, when steamboat navigation was in its adolescence; of its "flushest and widestawake epoch," when it bustled with activity, and was the arena on which all shades of Western and Southern river life and character were profusely displayed; and of its comparatively tranquil present epoch. In these sketches Mr. Clemens revives the glories of the Mississippi steamboat, and in his character, first, as an apprentice to the occupation of a river pilot, and afterward as one exercising that perilous and responsible trust, describes the characteristic features of the river, and the art and mystery of its navigation, together with the numberless phases of character and incident that entered into and diversified the life of the river, and of the people, cities, towns, and plantations that lined its shifting banks. Aside from the humor with which the narration is enlivened, and the instances of personal adventure and heroism with which it is embellished, the volume is an invaluable souvenir of a phase of American life and manners that has passed away never to be revived.

If the reader of Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi' shall miss from its pages the abounding strokes of whimsical humor that have tickled the fancy in other productions of this popular writer, he will find their comparative absence amply compensated for by the amusing and interesting medley of fact and fiction-historical, topographical, autobiographical, and descriptive of aspects of life on and beside the Great River-of which it is the repository. In a preliminary sketch of the physical history of the Mississippi, Mr. Clemens groups some curious facts. That it is the longest river in the world is tolerably well known, but he states some other things not so generally known ilInstrative of its peculiarities and eccentricities, among others, that it is the "crookedest"| of rivers, in one part of its journey using up 1300 miles to cover the same ground that the crow would fly over in 675 miles; that it discharges three times as much water as the St. Lawrence, twenty-five times as much as the Rhine, and three hundred and thirty-eight times as much as the Thames; that the area of its drainage is greater than that of any other river, and is equal to the combined area of all Europe outside of Russia; that it receives and carries to the Gulf water from fifty-four subordinate rivers which are navigable by steamboats, and some hundreds which are navigable by flats and keels; that instead of widening toward its mouth it grows narrower as well as deeper, being a mile in width and eighty-seven feet deep at the confluence of the Ohio, and a little over half a mile wide and 129 feet deep at its month; that its rise and fall is about fifty feet in the "upper river" above Natchez, and in the "lower river" is twenty-four feet at Bayon La Fourche, twenty-four feet at New Orleans, and only two and a half feet at the mouth; that it annually empties 406,000,000 tons of mud into the Gulf, or enough to make a solid mass a mile square and 241 feet high; that it is constantly straightening and short-Library, Publications of the Parker Society, and ening itself, in less than two centuries having diminished its length by "cut-offs" and otherwise at least 242 miles; and finally that it is constantly changing its "habitat" by moving bodily sidewise, until nearly the whole of the 1300 miles of the old Mississippi which La Salle floated down in his canoes two hundred years ago is now good solid dry ground. A graphic

5 Life on the Mississippi River. By Mark Twain. With more than Three Hundred Illustrations. Sold by Subscription Only. 8vo, pp. 624. Boston: James R. Osgood and Co.

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No one can proceed far in the study of theology without discovering the need of a guide to its copious literature. The Bible has had more labor expended on it than any other book extant; and Christian theology, which is the product of the Bible, has branched into departments each of which is of itself a distinct science. Dr. Hurst's volume, therefore, meets a want of theological students which has long been felt. It is select, giving mainly the choice books; fresh, giving the recent books; and yet so full that the most important theological works are included. In the distribution of his material the author follows the usual order, presenting in succession the English and American literature of exegetical, historical, systematic, and practical theology. A full introductory division contains the titles of valuable collected works, such as the Bampton Lectures, the Bridgewater Treatises, the Ante-Nicene

Dr. Pusey's editions of the Church Fathers. To have these titles directly before him will save the student many hours of toilsome research. He can, for instance, determine in a moment when a particular Bampton lecture wanted was delivered, and the lecturer's name. In almost innumerable ways this work will prove its labor-saving quality. No theologian

• Bibliotheca Theologica. A Select and Classified Bibliography of Theology and General Religious Literature. By JOHN F. HURST, LL.D. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

can do without some such help, and no such help as this has been heretofore offered in our language. Darling's Cyclopædia is too copious for a hand-book, Dr. Malcolm's Index is defective from its imperfect quotation of titles, and Spurgeon's Catalogue of English Commentaries upon the Bible relates to one department only of theology. Dr. Hurst's work strikes the mean between excess and defect, and with the revision which every such work requires from time to time, will take its place among the very first of theological bibliographies.

from which is to be reprobated. And, on the other hand, he had no sympathy with the views of the destructive school which rejects the authenticity of the Scriptures received by the primitive Church, and which considers its whole system a fabric built upon fable or invention. As he conceived it, the primitive Church was not a completed ecclesiastical structure, but a simple and in a large degree a voluntary community, having in itself the inherent constructive growth of a social state, or, in other words, that it was a living germ-but yet only a germ-not yet ripened, and which was to ripen and become more perfect in the process of years and experience. Sacerdotalism and the doctrine of the "apostolic succession" were later ingraftments of human invention. The Church was and has ever been in a state of growth, and, in Dr. Washburn's estimation, most nearly fulfills the objects of its institution and the purposes of its mission when it adapts itself to the social and historical development of man, while at the same time it draws him closer to God by the practice of virtue and holiness and a living faith in Christ. But the

In the preface the author thus describes his method of citation: "It has been my purpose to do full and equal justice to all denominational and confessional literature. The plan in giving titles comprises the full subject as stated by the author, the number of volumes when more than one constitute the book, the size of the work, the number of pages, both those in Roman as well as in Arabic numerals, and the place, publisher, and date of issue." Full information is thus furnished to the student in search of any particular work, and still farther aid is given by two indexes, one of authors and the other of subjects. It is gratify-general tenor of Dr. Washburn's arguments ing to know that this volume has already secured a favorable reception from theologians.

and conclusions as to the nature, origin, functions, sphere, and authority of the Church, and as to the principles of criticism that should THERE is abundant food for thought for be applied to Holy Scripture, preferably to the thinkers on religious subjects in a series of interpretations which have been imposed upon essays by the late Rev. E. A. Washburn, which it by theologians and ecclesiastical systems, have been collected in a volume entitled Epochs can not be more tersely and intelligently statof Church History, and other Essays, and edited ed than they have been in an outline of them by the Rev. C. C. Tiffany, of this city. Dr. admirably epitomized by Mr. Tiffany in the Washburn was something more than a deep preface to the volume under notice. "He thinker and a ripe scholar. He was also a had no sympathy," says Mr. Tiffany," with that man of profound convictions. What he be- view of church history which kept it apart. lieved, he believed with all his might, since it from the history of the civilization in which was not taken on trust, but was the result of the Church lived and acted, which it influsevere investigation, held in check by a faith | enced, and by which it was influenced in turn. that nothing could disturb. And although his It was as a vital factor in the life of men and temperament was not of that excitable kind nations that he found its value, not as a storewhich could be wrought up to a high pitch house of ecclesiastical traditions or the manof enthusiasm, no man could cling more tena-ufactory of theological propositions. It was ciously or more steadfastly than he to the truth the growth of a kingdom which he saw in the when he had once found it, or be more intense-rising walls of the city of God-a kiugdom ly earnest in its defense or exposition. It is destined to elevate the whole life of mankind, this quality of intense conviction and conta- individual, social, and political. In his view gious earnestness that is the most impressive the kingdoms of this world were to become the feature of these essays. With regard to the kingdom of God and his Christ, not by the origin, functions, and authority of the Church, consolidation of au ecclesiastical hierarchy or and of the ministry and sacraments, Dr. Wash- by the elaboration of theological subtleties, burn held the views entertained by the great but by the purification of all life through the body of Low-Church Episcopalians. He re-application of the righteousness and truth of jected, on the one hand, the traditional view accepted by High-Churchmen as to the scope and authority of the primitive Church with respect to matters of doctrine and church government, and was unable to find in it that complete form of Church life any departure

1 Epochs in Church History, and other Essays. By the late E. A. WASHBURN, D.D., Rector of Calvary Church, New York. Edited by the Rev. C. C. TIFFANY, Rector of Zion Church, New York. 12mo, pp. 389. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co.

the Gospel to every department of living. The Church, in its truth and fellowship, was the leaven, but the whole mass of human society, permeated and restored, was the completed kingdom. Hence came his appreciation of forms of Church life and action in other days, which he nevertheless believed had passed and ought to have passed forever...... His belief in Christ as the Revealer of God's life to human life was so reverent and so intense that he was, above all, earnest to study the