ears of foreign
experiment and home experience have furnished. We need a scientific
treatise on the whole subject of ordnance, regarding, for instance, the
strains of different charges and projectiles in large and small bores,
and the work done by projectiles and by cannon-metals having different
properties, under statical and sudden strains. This want Mr. Holley's
book does not undertake to fill, being in its structure somewhat
diffuse, and, as it were, of unequal expansion: the object being rather
to furnish the maximum of material for a systematic treatise, than to
write the treatise itself.

It has therefore the inestimable merits, and also some of the defects,
of a pioneer compilation. On many subordinate points, the details are
multiplied almost to weariness, while on some points more important
there are hardly any details at all. But this is simply because the
author could obtain the one class of facts and not the other. It is a
faithful registration, and the only one, of a vast multitude of
experiments and observations, which were absolutely inaccessible in any
other form. It is said to cause much wonder in England how its English
facts and statistics were obtained at all; and it is certain that Mr.
Holley must have used his opportunities of personal observation in a
manner worthy of the curiosity attributed to his race. We have in this
book the substantial results of the vast and costly English experiments;
while the more momentous results of our own practice, so familiar to
us, seem still unfamiliar across the water. This gives our nation a
great advantage, and renders it impossible to produce, at present, in
Europe, a work so encyclopaedic as this. It is not merely the best book,
but the only book, on the theme it treats: there is no other account of
the structure and results of modern standard ordnance. That it is the
work of a civil engineer, and not of a military or naval man, gives it
an additional interest; and the author may have owed to his position
some foreign opportunities which would have been refused to an officer.
The book is printed in the usual superb style of Van Nostrand, and is in
all respects an honor to the literature of the country.

_Historical View of the American Revolution._ By GEORGE
WASHINGTON GREENE. Boston: Ticknor & Fields.

Either of the two objects which Mr. Greene aimed to accomplish in
preparing the materials of this volume demanded on his part the
possession o