ticularly the accounts given of the oyster and its enemies and the star-fish and its depredations.
There is more of the genuine naturalist and less of the magazinist about the author of "Our Birds in their Haunts" than about most of our writers on out-of-door subjects. His book is really a valuable treatise on the birds of Eastern North America, sufficiently familiar in style to reach all classes of readers, and at the same time technical enough to enable an ambitious amateur to classify and adjust his own impressions and observations. Living, apparently, near the chain of great lakes, Mr. Langille has had peculiar facilities for studying many varieties of birds, both in their migrations and in their summer-nesting and brooding-times. He has a lively and impartial sense of the worth of each variety, and has studied its habits with a sort of rapture. In fact, his ardent love of the subject is almost alone sufficient to make the book interesting. He describes the note of each one of the songsters who make up the summer chorus with the fondness and enthusiasm of a lover. "It is difficult," he writes, "to speak of the bobolink without going into ecstasies;" and his allusions to the song-sparrow, thrush, and oriole are equally fervid. Much of the information given respecting the water-birds of the lakes, Hudson's Bay, and Nova Scotia is fresh and quite original, and the whole book shows faithful study and investigation, making it an interesting addition to our native works on ornithology.
Books for Young People.
We are sometimes ready to affirm that children should be allowed to read only those books which are really great. At least it should be well understood that the multiplication of new and trivial works for young people is a positive evil unless care be taken that what is really worth having is not crowded out or lost sight of in the rage for novelties. Hawthorne's "Wonder-Book" is a genuine classic, eternally fresh, yet ripe, serene, and joyous, the truths embodied by the stories as full of vigor and of charm as when they belonged to the religion of the Greeks. It is in itself too richly pictorial and highly imaginative to allow of its ever being satisfactorily illustrated; and we are glad that the publishers and designers of this new and fine edition have not been over-ambitious in trying to realize too fully to the eye those shifting and elusive impressions which belong to the fancy alone. Mr. Church has in general abstained from an over-free rendering of the allegories, and has contented himself with pretty and picturesque touches. Two little pictures of Pandora are felicitous in the extreme: but by far the best design in the volume represents Danaë and her babe,—
When in the carven chest,
The winds that blew and waves in wild unrest
Smote her with fear, she not with cheeks unwet
Her arms round Perseus set, …
as Simonides sang it in his pathetic lullaby more than two thousand years ago.
To have the work of Josephus condensed and simplified is a benefit conferred upon others besides youthful readers. Supplementing the chronicles of the Old Testament and filling up the gap between the final records given there and the fall of Jerusalem, it is—strange as the statement may appear—more generally read than any classical history. But Josephus is one of those authors whose narrative gains rather than suffers from abridgment, as it is often involved, often prolix, with no especial charm of style. And this edition, well condensed,
