rience in an endeavor to interest untutored minds in physiology. The effort was so successful in an English school among the poor that children and adults became eager to learn about the mechanism of the body.
The circulation of the blood, breathing, digestion, and sensation are described as journeys made by the blood, air, food, sound, and light; all technical names are translated into everyday English: the peritoneum is the over-all coat; the thyroid, the shield-ring. The terms employed are very ingenious and readily remembered; the stories apt and generally well founded. One, however, betrays a hasty generalization an American girl burns her hands on a grate in England because in America they only use closed stoves!
Nevertheless, the book is an excellent one, and may be heartily recommended for home reading, as well as to teachers of elementary classes.
Mr. Herbert Spencer on the Land Question. A Correction of Current Misrepresentations of his Views. New York: D. Appleton & Co. Pp. 30. Price, 25 cents.
A profound misconception respecting the difference between Mr. Spencer's original view concerning landownership and that he now holds having been widely diffused, he has thought it desirable to dissipate this misconception by a simple statement of what the original view was and what the present view is. For this purpose, besides a brief general statement in a preface of what his original doctrine was and what his views are now, and of the extent to which they have been modified, he reprints in parallel columns, Chapter IX of Social Statics, published in 1851, embodying the first published expression of his views, and pertinent extracts from Justice, published in 1891, embodying his latest published expression of them. He originally contended, he says, that the land could not become individual property, but was the property of the community, and that this is in fact the current legal doctrine, as illustrated in the theory of eminent domain. This doctrine he continues to hold, and has emphasized it in Justice, and strengthened it by numerous illustrative facts. With this assertion of the claim of the community to the land is coupled that of the private owner for compensation for the additional value he has given it when the state asserts its right. He contemplated, however, that the exercise of its claim by the community, under the condition stated, would leave a balance of benefit to it. If this were not the case, although he held the doctrine still good in absolute equity, he would in practice forbear the exercise of the right. Of late years he has become satisfied that the burden of compensation would outweigh the benefit of possession, if the compensation were anything like equitable in amount; and has therefore come to the conclusion that the change from private tenure to public would be impolitic. Furthermore, it has become clear to him that the prevailing assumption that the existing landowners hold from those who first seized the land and misappropriated it is untrue, and he has pointed out that among the people who are supposed to be robbed exist in large measure those who are descendants of the robbers. Hence the anger fostered against landholders is largely misdirected. These original views, as well as the modifications of them, are not at variance with the opinions held by the landed classes in England, but are views which they have themselves publicly enunciated through certain representative members of their class. The selections in parallel columns of the present pamphlet—which were first published for the use of the English Land Restoration League—are followed by a postscript, in which Mr. Spencer shows from authentic statistics that land in England is not all held by "dukes, earls, and baronets," but that an immensely larger proportion of owners possess but moderate quantities, and that those who possess small quantities are a hundred times in number those who possess great quantities. If equity requires that the large holders shall be expropriated, the same rule must apply to the small ones—in the majority of cases wage-earners who have acquired their estates by hard work and self-denial in poverty. Does any one in his senses advocate this? Having made this demonstration, Mr. Spencer adds that the beliefs expressed in the essay—1, that a reversion to public landownership could not justly be effected without compensation to private owners; 2, that the making of compensation would bring more loss than
