Part IV

of the New Hampshire Report as prepared by Dr. Hawes.

A vexing question concerning what are now called Cambrian terranes divided geologists for a quarter of a century after 1857, and had to be considered in preparing the geology of Vermont in 1861. This was the Taconic controversy. Trilobites had been discovered in Vermont, which were misunderstood by most of the American geologists following Hall, Logan, Dana, and others. In giving the species the technical name first of _Barrandesi_ and then _Olenellus_, Prof. James Hall asserted its derivation from the Hudson River group--relying upon the stratigraphical determinations of Sir W. E. Logan. As soon as Barrandes's attention was called to these trilobites and the attendant publication, he wrote his famous letter to Logan in 1860, declaring that there must be a mistake somewhere. That error was discovered in time to be eliminated from the Vermont report of the following year. Professor Hitchcock had charge of the field work in this Cambrian district, and his views of the arrangement of the formations are in agreement with those of the latest workers in the field. He applied the term of _Georgia_ to one division of the terrane in 1860; and the designation has been generally adopted since that time. Jules Marcou claimed priority in the suggestion of the application of the term, but upon the publication of Professor Hitchcock's statement on the subject the credit of priority was awarded to him by Director Walcott, of the United States Geological Survey.

Between 1860 and 1870 Professor Hitchcock was occupied largely as a mining geologist in the estimation of mineral deposits for mining companies, with his office in New York. In the prosecution of this business he traveled in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, and Alabama. Subsequently, the study of the phosphate beds led him to the island of Redonda in the West Indies. He further visited the phosphate beds of South Carolina and Florida, the gold fields of eastern Oregon, the Chalcedony Park of Arizona, the Grand Cañon of the Colorado, and the Yosemite and Yellowstone Parks. Studies made in the Hawaiian Islands and their volcanoes in 1883 and 1886 resulted in the contribution of important observations respecting those regions. At the present writing Professor Hitchcock is spending a year of further observations in those islands.

Mr. Hitchcock was appointed, in 1858, lecturer in zoölogy and curator of the cabinet in Amherst College; an office which he filled for seven years, retiring after the death of his father. In 1866 he was elected professor of geology in Lafayette College, where he gave short courses of instruction to five successive classes. In 1868 he was called to the chair of geology in Dartmouth College, a position which he still occupies, receiving a year's leave of absence for 1898-'99 in consideration of thirty years of service. He taught geology and zoölogy as a provisional professor at Williams College in 1881, and in the following year in the Virginia College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts, Blacksbury. He received the degree of M. A. in course at Amherst in 1859, the honorary degree of Ph. D. from Lafayette College in 1870, and that of LL. D. from Amherst College in 1896.

Professor Hitchcock has been connected with the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 1856, and a nearly constant attendant upon its meetings and participant in the proceedings. He is a member of local scientific societies in Portland, Me., Boston, Mass., New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, and also of the Imperial Geological Institute of Vienna. He was one of the most prominent movers in the inception and early history of the Geological Society of America, and had much to do with the organization of the International Congress of Geologists, and with the preparation of special reports for the several meetings between 1876 and 1890. The handsome geological map of small scale compiled for the United States was prepared by him and published in the Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers (1887), to illustrate the nomenclature and color scheme of the International Congress.

Professor Hitchcock is best known to many by his geological maps. The first efforts at mapping the geology of the United States were made independently by Edward Hitchcock and Jules Marcou in 1883--the work of Mr. Marcou extending only to the plains. Prof. H. D. Rogers, five or six years later, prepared a map for Johnston's Physical Atlas. In 1872 Prof. C. H. Hitchcock and Prof. W. P. Blake compiled a map for the ninth census of the United States, and for R. W. Raymond's report upon the mineral resources of the country. The success of his small scale map led Professor Hitchcock to undertake the preparation of a map on a scale of twenty-five miles to the inch for the whole country. For this he consulted every work that had been printed upon the geology of the United States, and obtained the privilege of using many unpublished data collected by geologists of States and Territories in which the work had never been carried to actual completion. The map prepared by the General Land Office was used as the basis for the geological coloration, and the work appeared in 1881, of a size adapted to use in the classroom. Its compiler has never seen any criticism of its accuracy. The edition prepared for the Mining Institute embodies all the information acquired for the large map, with such additional facts as had been learned since that map was published. Prof. Hitchcock's services were called into requisition in the compilation of a similar map for the United States Geological Survey, which was published in its annual report for 1886, under the editorship of W. J. McGee; in fact, the two maps were printed from the same plates, but Dr. Hitchcock's contained certain features not found in the other one--the result of different interpretations--and was more complete. In the Government edition a system of coloration devised by Major J. W. Powell, which was afterward abandoned, was employed.

Professor Hitchcock contributed extensively to the collection of State geological maps in the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, when large scale sheets of New England, and a large copy of the Hitchcock and Blake map of 1872, were exhibited. A medal was awarded for a sheet of thirteen sections illustrating the stratigraphy of Vermont and New Hampshire. The beginning of the measurement of sections was made for the Vermont Geological Report under the direction of Dr. Edward Hitchcock in 1861. Twelve lines of exploration across the entire State were determined upon, and specimens were collected to illustrate all the varieties of rock seen upon each. The specimens were arranged in the State Museum at Montpelier in geographical order. A similar plan of collection and arrangement was projected for the New Hampshire survey, but it was made to extend across the two States, from Maine to New York. Besides the two State reports, later publications were issued, descriptive of explorations and collections for the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the New Hampshire Agricultural Report for 1883. The work did not cease with these publications, for after the transfer of the collection of sections from the New Hampshire College of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts to Dartmouth College in 1894, additional explorations were made; the number of sections was increased to eighteen; improved drawings of the profiles, colored geologically, were prepared for the cases in the new Butterfield Museum; and the explanation of the details was further facilitated by the construction of a large relief map on the scale of one mile to the inch horizontally, twice as much vertically, and having colors corresponding to those on the profiles between the shelves. About five thousand specimens have been gathered to illustrate the profiles.

The Dartmouth College Museum is filled with specimens accumulated by the energy of Professor Hitchcock. They concern geology, paleontology, petrography, economic botany, and conchology.

FOOTNOTE:

[58] Vol. xlvii, September, 1895.

Editor's Table.

_EVOLUTION AND EDUCATION._

Our attention has been drawn to a lively discussion that has lately taken place in the St. Paul papers over the utterances, on the subject of the doctrine of evolution in its relation to education, of a certain Mr. Smith, who was appointed not long since superintendent of the public schools of that city. What seems clear is that Mr. Smith is a very ignorant man, whose views in regard to education are of an altogether retrograde character. How he came to be appointed to his present position is a question which is being gravely pondered by many of the citizens; but probably the explanation is not very far to seek. The dispensers of patronage in State and municipal affairs are not always competent to make the best nominations to offices calling for high qualifications; and sometimes they do not even act up to their own indifferent lights. The man that has the pull is very apt to be the man that gets the office, and it is not often that the strongest pull goes with the highest professional fitness.

However this may be, there Mr. Smith is, and what kind of a man he is may be judged from his utterances. It is thus that he refers to Mr. Spencer: "There is an old man in England who for years has spent all his time and devoted all his energies to the attempt to create a system which shall entirely ignore the name of the Deity. He will shortly die, and it shall not be remembered that he ever performed an act or said a word that blessed or comforted or relieved his suffering fellows." To further darken the picture, he contrasts Spencer with the late Cardinal Newman, who wrote the hymn "Lead, kindly light," and who, we are told, if he had done nothing more, would have been "followed by the blessings and the prayers of those whom he had comforted and saved." Again, dealing with the modern scientific view that, in the development of the human individual all antecedent stages of human development are, in a manner, passed through, he says: "Let us discard the primitive-man theory. You do not believe it. Rather shall we not hold with Emerson that every child born into the world is a new Messiah given into the arms of fallen humanity to lead them back to paradise?"

It is no part of our purpose to defend Mr. Spencer against the attacks of so negligible an assailant as Mr. Smith, of Minnesota. The words that Mr. Spencer has spoken for truth, for justice, for humanity, for peace, are his sufficient commendation and vindication--were vindication needed--in the eyes of all who have any competent knowledge of contemporary thought. If these words do not help to make the world better we should feel little inclined to put our trust in the most skillfully constructed sacred lyric. Men do not always know their benefactors; and it is altogether possible, nay probable, that thousands who perhaps never heard Mr. Spencer's name have benefited through the greater consideration with which they have been treated by others, owing to his teaching. It is quite possible for men, yes, and women too, to sing "Lead, kindly light" with great unction, and yet to be the ardent abettors of warlike sentiments and warlike acts--to revel in a ruthless and immoral jingoism. Dryden was not referring to the adherents of any evolutionist philosophy when he wrote:

"In lusts we wallow, and with pride we swell, And injuries with injuries repel; Prompt to revenge, not daring to forgive, Our lives unteach the doctrine we believe."

"Not daring to forgive" is good, and nearly as true in the nineteenth century as it was in the seventeenth. The one English statesman who dared to forgive a defeat inflicted on English arms and to acknowledge an error, incurred by that single act a deeper hatred and contempt than he earned by anything else, or all else, in his long and storm-tossed career. We refer to the action taken by Gladstone after the battle of Majuba Hill. And we are much mistaken if the majority of those who execrated him most deeply for not crushing the Boers under England's overwhelming force were not immense admirers of the cardinal's hymn. What is certain is that they were not immense admirers of Spencer, and that Spencer did not immensely admire them.

Superintendent Smith has quoted Emerson, but he does not occupy the standpoint that enables him to see Emerson in true perspective, or to feel what his philosophy lacks when confronted with the newer knowledge of the century. Mr. J. J. Chapman, in his recent memorable book of essays, gives us a better view. "A critic in the modern sense," Mr. Chapman says, "he (Emerson) was not. He lived too early and at too great a distance from the forum of European thought to absorb the ideas of evolution, and give place to them in his philosophy.... We miss in Emerson the underlying conception of growth, of development, so characteristic of the thought of our own day, and which, for instance, is found everywhere latent in Browning's poetry.... He is probably the last great writer to look at life from a stationary standpoint."

That the doctrine of evolution constitutes to-day a most important guiding principle in education no competent educationist could be found to deny. It teaches us to deal with the young as in a very true sense the heirs of all the ages, to make due allowance in childhood for instincts and habits which partake of the earlier stages of human development, and to look forward with confidence to later and higher manifestations. We have less faith than our ancestors had in the rod, and more in the gradual unfolding of the powers and capacities of the mind, and therewith the enlargement and improvement of the moral nature. We do not believe as our forefathers did in breaking children's wills; nor do we view their peccadilloes in the lurid light of a gloomy theological creed. We recognize that veracity, in the sense of strict accuracy of speech, purged of all imaginative elements, is a virtue which not all adults are able to practice, and which is not a natural product of the child mind. We can not accept Emerson's doctrine of infant Messiahs, and yet we can recognize very fully the mission of the child in the home, the demand it makes for tenderness, for patience, for thoughtfulness on the part of parents, the hopes and fears and heart-searchings that it calls into play, the aspirations that it promotes toward the realization, if for its sake only, of a higher life. Froebel grasped a large measure of truth in regard to children, but too much of sentiment, in our opinion, entered into his treatment of them. In the full light of the doctrine of evolution we take them as they are, and help them to work out under favorable conditions that development of which they are capable. We are not imposed upon by childish imitations of mature virtues, and are rather disposed to repress recognized tendencies to precocity; but we believe that the germs of good are sown in every normal human being, and that, unless killed by most unwise treatment, they will fructify in due time.

What we may well consider seriously is whether our modern modes of life enable us to do that justice to children which evolutionary teaching requires. Can true health of body and mind be conciliated with social ambition or with commercial ambition? Are we not hampered at every turn by false schemes of education, the object of which is to turn out certain conventional products? How many of us can rise up in effective rebellion against the very fashions that in our hearts we most condemn? Before there can be anything like a perfect education for the young there must be a much more fully developed sense of duty than we see as yet in the older generation. The doctrine of evolution is putting the key to a true system into our hands; but to use that key aright requires courage and high purpose--qualities that are not of everyday occurrence. Still, it is matter of congratulation that the truth is not far from us. It is well established in our theories, and one of these days we may hope it will gain a wide and secure footing in our practice.

_DAVID AMES WELLS._

In the death of David A. Wells, which occurred at his home in Norwich, Connecticut, on the 5th of November, 1898, America has lost one of her ablest and most productive men of letters and science a distinguished representative. Out of a life of seventy years it may fairly be said that Mr. Wells gave fifty of them to intellectual pursuits, which were mainly devoted to the advance of science and its application to practical affairs. After passing the period of early study, and particularly since he became interested in economic questions, much of his work was in the line of original investigation, the results of which have from time to time been given to the public either through his books or in the magazines. Another and more conspicuous feature of his career, the one perhaps that made him best known at home and first gave him reputation abroad, was the valuable service that he rendered the country at large in straightening out the financial tangle the Government had got itself into during and after the civil war. In this undertaking his great store of learning, rare practical sagacity, and unwavering confidence in the final result, carried him through to a brilliant success, earning for him in high quarters the most flattering testimonials of admiration and respect.

Looked at in the light of what he actually achieved, Mr. Wells's preparation for his life work seems to have been almost an ideal one. Gifted with a strong love of Nature and having a decidedly practical turn of mind, he early showed a fondness for the study of science. This led him, soon after graduating from Williams College in 1847, to enter the Lawrence Scientific School of Harvard University. Here he completed the course with the first class that was graduated by that institution in 1852. While studying in the scientific school young Wells became the special pupil of Agassiz, and, as the sequel shows, caught the enthusiasm with which that great master was wont to inspire the young men who were fortunate enough to come within the range of his influence. During this period Mr. Wells, in association with Mr. George Bliss, began the compilation and publication of the Annual of Scientific Discovery, which he continued for some sixteen years. That he was a clever student with quite exceptional endowments is seen in the circumstance that immediately after graduation he was appointed assistant professor in the scientific school and lecturer on physics and chemistry in Groton Academy, Massachusetts. He also, between 1857 and 1863, prepared a series of scientific school books embracing the subjects of physics, chemistry, and geology, and a volume on the Science of Common Things, all of which attained a wide circulation.

Thus for a period of nearly fifteen years Mr. Wells had devoted himself assiduously to the cultivation of the physical sciences. Beginning with the practical operations of the laboratory, where the value of experiment and observation is made apparent, his work was continued in the strengthening and developing experiences of the teacher, and thence led up to that wider knowledge and that clearness of exposition which a bright mind would acquire in the preparation of a number of successful scientific class books. It may be presumed that by this time he was thoroughly acquainted with scientific method in its applications to the investigation and explanation of physical phenomena. With the results this had yielded in building up the great body of verified knowledge composing the several sciences he must also have been familiar. Mentally alert and with sharpened powers of observation, he was able to seize and classify the facts bearing upon the problem in hand, and subject them to systematic processes of scientific reasoning.

Such, in brief, was the training and such the equipment brought by Mr. Wells to the study of economic questions when he first began to write upon them in 1864. A better preparation for the work to which he was to give the next thirty years of his life can scarcely be imagined. While it is quite true that in entering this new field he was to encounter a class of facts and variety of phenomena that were of a very different order from those with which he had previously been dealing, their apparently haphazard character did not deceive him. Well versed in the practice of tracing effects to causes, gifted with remarkable powers of insight, and thoroughly believing that the methods of science would prove as available in the study of economics as in other fields, he began his investigations without misgiving, patiently accumulated and studied the facts, and when conclusions were arrived at, no matter how contrary they might be to current teaching, fearlessly announced and defended them. Though half his life a firm believer in the doctrine of protection, when Mr. Wells went to Europe for the Government in 1867 to investigate the subject of tariff taxation, high and low tariff countries alike were visited, with the determination to leave nothing undone that would aid to a better understanding of the question. All the varied aspects of the problem were carefully studied in connection with the principal industries of the respective countries, and, finding reason in the facts thus obtained to revise his opinions, he came home a convert to free trade. For an account of what he had observed during the course of his investigations, and of the conclusions based thereon, the reader is referred to the fourth volume of his reports as commissioner of internal revenue, published in 1869. His book on Recent Economic Changes, and the papers on The Principles of Taxation, that have appeared in this magazine during the last two years, are records of equally painstaking research. Moreover, they are both excellent examples of what a strict adherence to scientific method has done and may yet be expected to do toward clearing up the knotty problems in economics that are now engaging public attention.

United with his great learning, and a rare power of generalization, Mr. Wells possessed in full measure that intellectual honesty which is the indispensable characteristic of the true man of science. This enabled him to follow without doubt or hesitation wherever the facts might lead; and with his clear perception of their real import, joined to his habit of independent thought, traits that are displayed throughout all his more formal writings, they are what in our opinion constitute his title to distinction. They give to his teachings, which have already done more than any other agency that we know toward placing the subject of political economy on a sound scientific basis, a high and enduring character.

_A BORROWED FOUNDATION._

"The central idea of Professor Giddings's Principles of Sociology, a work that has the honor of being the first independent attempt in English to treat of sociology as such, is that we must postulate on the part of human beings what he calls a _consciousness of kind_. Critics of his volume have naturally told him that this is essentially a philosophical idea, found in Hegel and in British ethical writers of the eighteenth century."

We quote the above from an article by Professor Caldwell, entitled Philosophy and the Newer Sociology, in the October Contemporary. We are not prepared to dispute Professor Caldwell's statement that the idea of the "consciousness of kind" may be found in the writers to whom he refers; but it would have been very much to the point if he had mentioned that it is to be found most clearly enunciated in Mr. Herbert Spencer's Principles of Sociology. In an article contributed to this magazine in December, 1896, Mr. Spencer took occasion to point out that what Professor Giddings seemed to regard as an _aperçu_ peculiar to himself had been distinctly formulated years before in his own writings. In proof of this he quoted the following passages:

"Sociality having thus commenced, and survival of the fittest tending ever to maintain and increase it, it will be further strengthened by the inherited effects of habit. _The perception of kindred beings, perpetually seen, heard, and smelt, will come to form a predominant part of consciousness-_-so predominant that absence of it will inevitably cause discomfort." "Among creatures led step by step into gregariousness, there will little by little be established a pleasure in being together--a pleasure in the consciousness of one another's presence--a pleasure simpler than, and quite distinct from, those higher ones which it makes possible."

The fact is that there is much more in Spencer than most recent writers have ever explored; and the newer sociologists would do well, before putting forward claims to originality, to make sure that they have not been anticipated by the veteran philosopher.

Scientific Literature.

SPECIAL BOOKS.

In _The Play of Animals_[59] we are offered a book upon an essentially new topic; for, although much has been written concerning the habits and intelligence of animals, no special consideration has been given to their play or its psychic significance. The survey of this virgin territory seems to the critical reader to have disclosed such limitless area to Professor Groos that he fails to indicate its legitimate boundaries. He confesses himself overcome by a sense of its vastness, stating that the "versatility needed for a thorough investigation is so comprehensive that it is unattainable by an ordinary mortal."

Play, he finds, is not "an aimless activity carried on for its own sake"; neither is it the product of surplus physical energy, as Mr. Spencer defines it, for in youth there is playfulness without this condition. Instincts useful in preserving the species appear before they are seriously needed, and are utilized in play, which serves as preparation for the tasks of life. "Animals do not play because they are young, but have a period of youth in order to play."

The special ends accomplished by play are control of the body, command of the means of locomotion, agility in pursuit of prey and in escaping danger, and prowess in fighting. The games pursued in attaining these ends are classified in nine groups, beginning with those of experimentation and ending with those referred to curiosity. They include plays of movement, hunting, fighting, love, construction, nursing, and imitation. For all of these Professor Groos finds but one instinct of play responsible, supplemented by the instinct of imitation. He enters into an elaborate discussion of instinct, giving an outline of Weismann's theory of heredity and the views of various writers. He adopts Herbert Spencer's definition of instinct as a complex reflex act, referring its origin to the operation of natural selection, acknowledging the process to be beyond our grasp. In seeking to explain bird song and the love play of animals, the theory of sexual selection is not accepted by him without qualification; a modification of the Darwinian principle is suggested in which the female exerts an unconscious choice. The psychic characteristics of play are the pleasure following satisfaction of instinct, energetic action and joy in the acquirement of power. The animal at first masters its own bodily movements, then seeks the conquest of other animals and inanimate objects. When a certain facility in play has been gained a higher intellectual stage is entered upon, that of make-believe, or playing a part. This state of conscious self-illusion is reached by many of the higher animals. Psychically, it indicates a divided consciousness, and occupies a place between the ordinary state and the abnormal ones of hypnosis and hysteria. To this condition Professor Groos ascribes the genesis of artistic production, an hypothesis that he has elaborated more fully in _Einleitung in die Aesthetik_.

The experimental plays of animals, divided into those of courtship, imitation, and construction, correspond to the principles of self exhibition, imitation, and decoration, which are claimed to be the motives of human art. The acquirement of power through play develops a feeling of freedom, and this the artist likewise seeks to realize in the world of ideals.

Artists will not probably acknowledge that "life is earnest, art is playful," nor moralists agree that "man is only human when he plays, for there is no real freedom in the sphere of experience," yet both may find food for thought in Professor Groos's analysis of play.

FOOTNOTE

[59] The Play of Animals. By Karl Groos. Translated by Elizabeth L. Baldwin. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 341. Price, $1.75.

* * * * *

In the spasm of unreasoning hostility to Spain which has come over the people of the United States, succeeding a period of effusive admiration, the public are apt to forget that that nation has done anything creditable for the promotion of civilization. Yet, leaving out other fields of culture for the present, it has produced two painters who rank among the great masters, besides numerous secondary artists, rivals of any of that grade in the world, and a voluminous literature which George Ticknor thought it worth while to make the study of his life, and which inspired the pens of Irving, Longfellow and Lockhart. One of the works of this literature ranks among the world's greatest classics, and has been, perhaps, after the Bible and Shakespeare more universally read than any other book; and numerous other works--chiefly romances--have furnished patterns or themes for the poets, novelists, and dramatists of other nations. Mr. _Fitz Maurice Kelly's_ excellent and convenient _History of Spanish Literature_[60] therefore comes in good time to refresh our memories concerning these facts. One does not have to go very far in the history to find that of the great Latin writers of the age of the Cæsars, the two Senecas, Lucan the poet of Pharsalia, Martial the epigrammatist, and Quintilian the rhetorician--still an authority--and many minor writers, "were Spaniards as well as Romans." It also appears that of what Gibbon declared to have been the happiest epoch of man's history--from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus, seventy of the eighty years, if we take the liberty, as Mr. Kelly does, of counting Marcus Aurelius as a Cordovan, were passed beneath the scepter of the Spanish Cæsars. Prudentius, a distinguished Latin Christian writer of a succeeding age, was also a Spaniard. Although there were "archaic" works of _trovadors_ before that time, traditionally preserved by _juglars_, Spanish literature proper began in the twelfth century. It owed much to French and Italian, and in course of time gave much back to them. Among its earliest signs was the development of the romance (ballad), while Arab writers (whose work Mr. Kelly considers of doubtful value) and Jews, who are better spoken of, were early contributors to it. The earliest works of importance were the Mystery of the Magian Kings, one of the first plays in any modern language, and the great heroic poem of the Cid, both anonymous. The first Castilian poet whose name has reached us was Gonzalo de Berceo, 1198 to 1264, who wrote much, and was, "if not an inventor, the chief of a school." Permanent form was given to Spanish prose by King Alfonso the Learned, 1226 to 1284, who, "like Bacon, took all knowledge for his province, and in every department shone pre-eminent." He had numerous collaborators, and "his example in so many fields was followed"--among others (in some of them) by his son and successor, Sancho IV. The Infanta, Juan Manuel, nephew of Alfonso, in one of the stories of his Conde Lucanor--"one of the books of the world"--created the germ of the Taming of the Shrew. Passing a numerous list of writers of respectable merit, for whose names even we have not room, we come to the age of the Catholic kings and Charles V, when for a hundred and fifty years literature most flourished in Spain. Among the features of this period are the Amadis de Gaul--"the best in that kind"--which inspired Cervantes; Columbus, who, though of Italian birth, "was probably the truest Spaniard in all the Spains," the poet Garcilaso de la Vega, and Bernal Diaz and other historians whose names dot Prescott's books. Passing a large number of writers of mark whose works appeared in this age, and stopping only to mention Alonzo de Ercilla y Zuñiga's Araucana as the first literary work of real merit composed in either American continent, we come to the age of Cervantes, whose story of Don Quixote--"the friendless people's friend," as Browning styles him--is not more distinguished for its satirical wit and humor than for its kindly humanity; and Lope de Vega, that most prolific of all dramatic authors, who "left no achievement unattempted," and died lamented by a hundred and fifty-three Spanish and fifty Italian authors, who sang his praises. Among other of the most distinguished writers of this and succeeding periods are Mariana, "the greatest of all Spanish historians"; Góngora, a famous poet in his day; Quevedo; Tirse de Molina, the creator of Don Juan; Calderon, second as a dramatist among Spaniards, if second, only to Lope de Vega, and Alarcón his compeer; and Velasquez, great in art and not small in letters. An interregnum came in during the reign of Carlos II, and French influence made itself felt. The age of the Bourbons produced among others the Benedictine Sarmiento, who as a botanist "won the admiration and friendship of Linné." The present century has been marked by the names of many authors of merit, novelists known to us in translations, by an active movement of historical composition developing brilliant monographs, and by a marked advance of scholarship and tolerance, led by Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo; with a tendency to produce "a breed of writers of the German type."

FOOTNOTE:

[60] A History of Spanish Literature. By James Fitz Maurice-Kelly. New York: D. Appleton and Company. (Literature of the World Series. Edited by Edmund Gosse.) Pp. 433. Price, $1.50.

GENERAL NOTICES.

The great importance of the problems of forestry and all that pertains to them can not fail to be appreciated by any one who has seen the devastation wrought in many sections of this country by the "wood chopper." Forestry is one of the subjects where natural science can step in and guide the way to economic success, and where, in default of scientific methods, economically fatal results inevitably ensue. The preservation of forests has been an important problem in Europe for many years, but until quite recently it has received little attention in the United States. One of the pioneers in the field of forestry in this country was Franklin B. Hough, whose Elements of Forestry is still a used and useful manual. Among his many schemes for attracting attention and study to this important subject was one of making actual sections of the wood of American trees, and arranging them in a compact and attractive manner for general distribution. This idea he never carried out, and it has remained for his son, Mr. R. B. Hough, to finally carry out the scheme, by publishing a complete series of such sections, carefully prepared and compactly bound.[61] In