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Lovers of dainty anthologies will remember the pretty Book of Christmas, which the Macmillans published last year. They now publish a companion volume, "The Book of Easter." Right Reverend Bishop Doane furnishes an introduction; and the book is composed of Easter songs and meditations from many sources, Easter stories and reflections suited to the days before Easter as well as to Easter itself, with copies of Easter pictures from the old masters and imaginative drawings by George Wharton Edwards. Altogether the little book fills a place hitherto quite vacant.

Mr. Charles Morley's "London at Prayer" is composed of papers written for the "Pall Mall Magazine," and describing not places of prayer only but also places in which that labor which

is the equivalent of prayer is pursued. The subjects are chosen quite irrespective of creed, and the treatment is that of a sympathetic observer rather than an enquirer or investigator. They include the Barnardo Home, the Salvation Army, the Little Sisters of the Poor and the Daughters of St. Vincent, whom the author names "butterfly sisters" from their peasant coifs, Westminster, Saint Paul's, John Wesley's chapel, the Great Synagogue in Jewry, a Quaker meeting-house, and the Poor Brothers of the Charter-house, of whom the best known is he who never existed, Colonel Thomas Newcome. So through London fares the author, looking only for the things which are lovely and of good report, and finding so many that his book is one of the most cheerful of the season. The illustrations are excellent and worthy of the text. The

conventional cathedral tour might very well find a rival in a tour of London based on this work. E. P. Dutton & Co.

Some prefaces may be neglected, but that of Professor Frederic L. Paxson's "The Last American Frontier," must be read, under penalty of mistaking a purposely picturesque sketch for a grave historical work. As the author is a professor of American history in the University of Michigan, the latter rather than the former is naturally expected, but when the bristling dates and careful statistics do not appear, one soon discovers that the apparent carelessness is the ease of intimacy. By his title Professor Paxson means the last dividing line between the white man and the red, the last wave mark of the rising tide of civilization, and his happy mastery of his subject enables his readers to grasp it far more effectually than by the method of supplying them with dates and incidents and leaving them to shape their own vision of the progress of settlement as whole. His use of the geographical factor is very skilful, and the elementary school-teacher who seizes on the hints afforded in this work will enliven his classes and may even hope to rouse his pupils to that ceaseless movement in human affairs, the perception of which so vivifies history. To the general reader, this compact, easily comprehensible account of the changes by which the West and the East have been made one will be welcome. Macmillan Company.

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Mrs. Anna Chapin Ray's "Over the Quicksands," is her first essay in a new field far larger than the pleasant pastures into which she has hitherto led her readers. The book traces the story of a deliberate and prolonged sin, concealed from the world and from the two children whom it most concerned, until it tem

porarily blighted their lives. It is hardly possible to speak more definitely without diminishing the reader's interest, but Mrs. Ray has managed this more serious plot quite as well as her gay comedies of maidens choosing and lovers wooing and in her studies of slightly warped but sound characters. Also she has done her work quite without the queer self-consciousness sometimes exhibited by a writer attempting a new style and in a manner equally remote from timidity and from awkwardness. The two sinners are intentionally made the most striking figures of the tale, and the strong contrast between their behavior is a daring experiment on the reader's credulity, but the author's success justifies her choice of it. If she should work only for older readers in future they will gain an entertainer well skilled in her art and holding her pen and her mind in perfect control. She has far surpassed the model which she herself set up in early days. Her Teddy is a trifling ghost beside the successful author of many tales from Litwhom many more ought to come. tle, Brown & Co.

"Religion in the Making," by Professor Samuel G. Smith of the Uni

versity of Minnesota, had a quaint origin, being the result of his teaching sociology to upper classmen in the University, and teaching the Bible to special classes in the People's Church, St. Paul. After some years of this work. it struck him that sociology might be an excellent instrument for the interpretation of the Bible, and that the Bible might be a rich source of sociological material. Having pursued the conjoined study of the two subjects for some two years with select companies of students, he offered work in Biblical sociology to his university classes, and after four years of testing it, has shaped part of his work into this

volume, which will be followed by a second on the domestic, political and industrial life of the Hebrews. The first six chapters of the present work exhibit some of the aspects of the religious problem, define sociology, and the social value of religion, rehearse the current scientific views of the Bible, describe the scenes of its chief incidents and the more important of the races figuring in it. Then, after explaining how the idea of God has developed, Professor Smith writes on the sacred persons, places, services, and objects connected with the religion of the Hebrews, their sacred days and their conception of sanctity and draws a few conclusions. The assistance which a reader of the Bible, be his aim what it will, may draw from the work is incalculable. Even if he be fairly well read in Spencer, Miller and Renan. Barth, and Lotze, Professor Smith's swift review of the subject and his comments will renew interest in it, and if he bring an untaught mind to the reading he will feel that he has found a new Bible. The Macmillan Company.

The day is long past when one could accuse of a desire for notoriety the woman whose books revealed a wide acquaintance with the possibilities of human depravity, and when one encounters a story in which a clever writer bends all her talent and knowledge of the world to showing that honor, pride, ambition, gratitude, good feeling, duty and personal fastidiousness are equally impotent to protect a man from an evil woman, provided only that she be the embodiment of some "art," one finds the story commonplace. No elaboration will give novelty to the old sophistries-the only opportunity for originality lies in devising the steps by which a man of even moderate shrewdness may be led to accepting them. In her "Tower of Ivory," Mrs. Gertrude Atherton dis

plays much ingenuity in such devices. Her hero, the younger brother of an impoverished peer, is represented as a man of ability, though giving no proof of it except the nice conduct of a wardrobe including 284 neckties, some capacity for courteous insolence, and that well-worn trait, scorn of his creditors. But he has no safeguards whatever against a wonderful singer of Wagner's music, and her frank and detailed acknowledgment of thirteen years of life of deepest shame does not hinder him from sacrificing every human being belonging to him to his passion for her. Mrs. Atherton is skilful enough, and her description of a Wagnerian performance clever enough, to produce a temporary aberration during which the reader finds him less contemptible than he really is. She herself has no delusions about him though she seems persuaded that the great singer, had she not committed the unpardonable sin of disloyalty to art, would have been an ideal woman. The Macmillan Company.

Professor James L. Kellogg of Williams College opens his valuable "Shell Fish Industries," the new volume in the American Nature Series, with a vigorous exposition of the wanton wastefulness of the American, but it is extremely doubtful if he expected it to produce the slightest effect upon any guilty reader. The colonial American wasted as much of every thing as his tools and facilities for carriage permitted, and the nineteenth century immigrants took advantage of new inventions, the formation of the country and increased ease of transportation to make the proceedings of their predecessors seem tame and spiritless. destruction of a continent in a few centuries is a possibility with such citizens. After enumerating such gleams of hope as he perceives in the prospect, Professor Kellogg addresses himself to

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making accounts of the food mollusks interesting to eaters and to cultivators, and those to whom the problem of controlling their production has biological attractions. Chapters on the anatomy of the food mollusks, and their development, and the ciliary mechanisms, introduce the subjects of oyster culture and growth in Europe. Japan and America; the implements used in gathering and cultivating; the natural enemies of the American oyster, and bivalves in relation to disease. All the great oyster fields of the United States are described, their histories are given as far as known, and five closing chapters on the hard shelled and soft shelled clam and scallops close the work. As he was writing with a triple aim, Professor Kellogg was compelled to include many small matters not to be found in other works and the excellent index was a necessity. The eater of the oyster, the cultivator and the scientific observer should be equally satisfied. Henry Holt & Co.

If the present year continue as it begins, it will be more prolific in good books than any twelve month of the last five. Following close on the new edition of the "History of Italian painting," comes "The Evolution of Italian Sculpture," by Lord Balcarres, and invites renewed study of a sister art, considering it in a manner especially grateful to the conservative and the religious, and eschewing the affectations of all the "modern" schools. The introduction dwells upon the traditions of imperial art, the decadence of old sources of inspiration, the discovery of new fountains, and the acquisition of new characteristics derived from the barbarian invaders, and the first chapter shows with what these elements were blended, the indigenous rudiments of Italian sculpture, beginning with Benedetto Antelami. Illustrating this chapter is a group of six façades pre

sented in pictures extraordinarily stereographical in quality and so clear that Ruskin would have given a volume to the statement of their beauties, and the reader finds it difficult to leave them. This presentation of groups instead of single examples is a noteworthy feature of the book and worthy of imitation by future writers. The second chapter, "The Progress of Form," the third, "Portraiture," and the fourth "Anatomy and the Nude" prepare the way for the next five, "Religious Thought All-Pervading," "Plastic Embodiments of Religious Thought," "Secular Thought and Secular Form," "Classical Thought" and "Baroque," and in these the duplex interest of the work, actual sculpture and its ethical development is unfolded and enforced. Biography, authenticity, all other distracting elements, are neglected for the sake of these two and the result is such a series of strong impressions as one does not often receive. It must be remembered that the author is not yet forty years of age, that he is an active member of the House of Commons, that he holds more than one important public position connected with art interests, in order to estimate the immense energy and devotion implied by this volume. The mere conception of the work might make a reputation; its execution should bring fame of no mean order. The style, no trivial detail in the literature of art, is clear and dignified, with a just assignment of ornament, and here and there that smallest touch of humor invariably accompanying imaginative power sufficient to the understanding of art. book is a thick quarto and its grouped and single illustrations all of excellent quality number six score. The author

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half promises a subsequent volume examining the primitive phase by a different system of analysis and illustration, and it will be awaited with high expectations. E. P. Dutton & Co.