in
the mutual intercourse and common discipline through which the Western
communities were developed, was cut off from association with its more
fortunate kindred and subjected to influences from which they were, for
the most part, exempt. To hold up the crude democracy and turbulent
assemblies common in a primitive state of society as evidence that the
Russian people possessed at an early period of its history a beautifully
organized constitutional system; to contend that the most absolute
monarchy in existence has maintained itself for centuries, without
encountering a single serious insurrection, in a nation whose
distinguishing characteristic is its inability to endure a ruler; to
treat the introduction of a totally different and far more complex
system of government, the product elsewhere of elements that have no
existence in Russia, and of long struggles supplemented by violent
revolutions, as a thing that may be effected without danger or
difficulty, the "method" being "really not of importance,"--all this
strikes us as evincing a condition of mind that can only be regarded as
a survival from the period when the theories and illusions of the
eighteenth-century _philosophes_ had not yet been dissipated by the
French Revolution.

"A Naturalist's Wanderings in the Eastern Archipelago:
A Narrative of Travel and Exploration from 1878 to 1883."
By Henry O. Forbes, F.R.G.S.
New York: Harper & Brothers.

Although a long succession of naturalists have done their best to
familiarize readers with the islands of the Eastern Archipelago, Mr.
Forbes's book is full not only of freshly-adjusted and classified facts,
but of curious and valuable details of his own discoveries. Even the
best-known islands of the group are so inexhaustible in every form of
animal and vegetable life that much remains for the patient gleaner
after Darwin and Wallace, who found here some of the most striking
illustrations of their deductions and theories, It is well known that
startling contrasts in the distribution of plants and animals are met
with in these islands, even when they lie side by side; and in no other
part of the world is the history of mutations of climate, of the law of
migrations, and of the changes of sea and land, so open and palpable to
the scientific observer. Mr. Forbes's object seems to have been to visit
those islands which offer the most striking deviations from the more
general type. His earlier explorations