ferent statement. Mr. Henry's note escaped Mr. Ford's, notice, but learning of Tucker's before his seventh volume came out, he has inserted a slip, incorrectly giving Tucker's reading as "that it is not usual now," and adding that no proof is produced beyond the "mere assertion of Mr. Tucker," and that, the press-copy having been destroyed, "it is now impossible to verify the facts." In the volume now under review, the letter is printed from the original sent to John Taylor. It reads "unusual." There are other important differences between this and the Randolph text. The notes to this volume do not show close familiarity with the Virginia of Jefferson's time.
The Life of James Dwight Dana, Scientific Explorer, Mineralogist, Geologist, Zoologist, Professor in Yale University, by Daniel C. Oilman, President of the Johns Hopkins University. (Harper, 1899, pp. xii, 409.) This book will be welcomed by multitudes of former students at Yale, who remember Professor Dana with reverence and affection, as well as by his personal and professional friends in many lands. It is the life-story of a remarkable man, and the narrative displays all the sympathy and catholicity of spirit, the versatility of mind and the vivacity of style for which President Oilman is noted. The work is embellished with several portraits of Dana, and contains in a second part a considerable selection from his scientific correspondence with Darwin, Gray, Agassiz and others.
Professor Dana was undoubtedly a great man, in endowment, in character, in industry, and in the impulse given by him to scientific studies in America. Yet somehow, one hardly knows why, he does not seem so impressive a figure in this biography as he did in the flesh. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the material of the book is spread out somewhat thinly, and in places diluted or supplemented by matter only remotely related to its subject. Perhaps it is due to the fact that several of the themes with which Dana was earnestly engaged, in science, philanthropy and theology, no longer interest us or have taken on different forms. Possibly it may be due in part to the inevitable comparison suggested between the subject of the book and so epoch-making a mind as Darwin. Nevertheless, no one can read the work without gaining a fresh sense alike of Dana's intellectual and moral greatness, and of the immense and beneficent advance in science which, during the sixty years of his activity, he witnessed and did so much to stimulate and direct.
The de Forests of Avesnes (and of New Netherlands); A Huguenot Thread in American Colonial History, by J. W. De Forest (New Haven: The Tuttle, Morehouse and Taylor Co., 1900, pp. xx, 288). In the preface the author disclaims any intention of producing a complete family history of the Avenese de Forests in Europe and America, which he declares a more serious labor than he cares to confront. He states his purpose to be merely "to discover the origin of the family,
