, by some strange fatality they
were certain to get loose and turn up among his fellow-passengers in car
or diligence. To twine snakes around the necks and arms of young ladies
playing quadrilles was another harmless joke. "Don't be afraid," he
would say: "they won't hurt you. And do be a good girl, and don't make a
fuss." He possessed an easy gift of adapting scientific theories and
deductions to popular interest and comprehension, and his "Curiosities
in Natural History" and other writings undoubtedly gave a strong impulse
to the tastes of this generation, of which the many out-of-doors papers
on birds, game, and the habits of all living creatures are the result.

"George Eliot's Poetry, and Other Studies." By Rose Elizabeth
Cleveland. New York: Funk & Wagnalls.

Miss Cleveland's book shows wide reading, study, painstaking
discrimination, enthusiastic zeal, and, above all, the never-failing
impulse of an individual idea. It reveals on every page a healthy,
well-poised womanly nature, and the opinions advanced are a part of the
conscience and moral being as well as of the intellect. The author has
fed her mind and heart with high dreams and lofty ideals, and it is not
only a pleasure to her to disclose them, but a sacred duty as well.

"When a high thought comes," she writes in "Reciprocity," "we owe that
thought to the world. A great deal of this interment of our best
thought-life is justified to ourselves by the plea that such thoughts
are too sacred for utterance: a wretched sophistry, a miserable excuse
for what is really our fear of criticism." There is nothing trivial or
false about the critical and ethical views which Miss Cleveland gives
bravely, although they are not invariably rendered with the felicity and
pointed phrase which come from a careful selection of words and symbols.
She is a little dazzled by the flowers and fruitage of a fancy which
most of us are compelled to curb and prune to meet the requisitions of
time and space. These papers were prepared chiefly, the dedication tells
us, for schools and colleges, and a little of the pedantry and ample
leisure of a teacher who has his audience safe under his own control is
apparent in them. Little goes without saying; the whole story is told;
yet it is always easy to put aside the parasitical growth and get at the
solid and useful idea. The book was not written for critics who desire
to have everything summed up in a single sentence, and who a