As a brilliant avant-coureur of the Christmas holiday-time, with its gift-books in sumptuous editions, comes a richly-bound quarto with seven full-page photo-gravures of exquisite finish, illustrating the "Seven Ages of Man" according to Shakespeare's famous text. The artists, who are Church, Shirlaw, Hovenden, St. John Harper, Gaul, Frost, and Smedley, have each contributed excellent work, all more or less unconventional, and some evincing real freshness and raciness. Their pictures show no straining after over-subtile and far-fetched interpretations of the poetic meaning they seek to embody, neither are they too much the revival of the antique and mediæval. Mr. Hovenden's "Lover," if not strikingly original, is a very beautiful study in its way, and so happily conceived as to be thoroughly enjoyable. The most striking picture in the book is Mr. Shirlaw's "Last Scene of All," which excels both in dignity of motion and in pathos, the stricken and helpless aspect of the old man contrasting powerfully with those signs that his face shows of the intellect which now lives only in his fears. The two opening illustrations are clever and effective, although Mr. Church's rendering of "the infant" is somewhat too much allied to the fashion for mere prettiness. In the "school-boy" Mr. Harper has stretched the text a little and made the bold innovation of a little drama on his own account, setting the laggard to robbing a bird's nest as he creeps unwillingly to school. The landscape and figures he introduces are pleasing, and the picture is full of ease, charm, and, above all, unexpectedness. The whole series excels in simplicity and directness, and the meaning of the author is nowhere wasted in vapid and lifeless abstractions, but is rendered with a vigor and strength which enhance the worth of words that are so familiar as to be a part of our every-day consciousness. Too much could hardly be said of the delicacy and beauty of the photo-gravure process by which the artists' work is reproduced. Besides this larger and more expensive edition there is offered a smaller one, illustrated with wood-engravings after the original pictures, quite as effective, in a different way, and of admirable finish.
"Bees by the instinct of nature do love their hives, and birds their nests," and all animals cling to their haunts and their ways, thus affording a most satisfactory opportunity for study and repaying careful observation by their consistent and regular behavior. Yet there is as much ardor in a naturalist's pursuit of some missing link which shall complete his chain of facts concerning the öology of his neighborhood, and as much delight in its detection, as in a circumnavigator's successful discovery of a new island. For, near although the lower forms of life are to us, they yet constitute a separate world. With the exception of the few we have domesticated, winged and four-footed creatures remain almost unmodified by our proximity and our laws, going through their operations as they have done since their primary development. Thus, to watch and observe the life which goes on in the forest, in the marsh, and on the sea-coast is to study primitive history. Mr. Ernest Ingersoll advocates the formation of clubs of amateur naturalists; but the careful and patient methods of a real lover of natural history belong to but few. It is easy enough to exterminate, or at least to drive from us, the abounding life that belongs to nature, and it would probably be well that amateur naturalists should chiefly delight in the study of what we need to be rid of. Birds, squirrels, and, in fact, all the pretty creatures that we love should be allowed to go on their ways uninterfered with, safe from friend and enemy alike. Let amateurs study mosquitoes and other poisonous insects which afford an ample and most useful field. Mr. Ingersoll carries a very pleasant method into his studies, and, where he does not give the results of his own labors, is a fair interpreter of other men's observations. Naturally, he writes best about what he has seen and done himself, and if he had expanded the opening chapter of the book, "My First Tree-Chopping," into a series of every-day experiences, his volume would be not only more true to its title, but better worth reading. The varied contents are, however, all excellent in their way, par-
