owner to look in upon the progress of his bees. In this way more honey and of a better quality is made, than by the ancient mode of destruction; and at the same time the cruel process is avoided of stifling them for their nectareous labors; and all the swarms, destroyed on the ancient process, in this are perpetuated, and help to increase the aggregate of productive

swarms.

An apiary ought to be in a retired position, cool in summer and warm in winter. The hives should be regularly arranged under a tight roof. Flowering trees ought to be near, trees of pleasantness and shelter, and fit for receiving the swarms, and yet not such thickets, as are calculated to attract the birds and insects, that are their enemies. They are remarkable for requiring neatness in and about their establishments. The immediate contiguity ought to be free from tangle of weeds and briars. A rolled gravel level would be best. But smooth shaven grass sward should be nearand the ripple of pure waters, and extent of flowers and aromatic shrubs, and, if possible, range of open woods.

Every thing relating to their swarming is well known, except the fact, that by very simple and easy processes their swarming may be accelerated or retarded. By lifting the hive two or three inches from the bench, or by any process, which renders the hive cooler, they may be longer retained in it. By subjecting them again to greater degrees of heat suddenly applied, the swarm may be mechanically forced out upon the experiment of cooling themselves.

Honey is not extracted directly from any substances, but becomes so by the process of assimilation in the stomach of the insect. The well known matters, which they prepare, are honey, wax and propolis. The latter answers the purposes of varnish and cement in their building. The well known delightful field of plunder of the bee is the petal of flowers of every scent and hue, from which they extract their aromatic and saccharine matters; and none have been so heedless, as not to have observed the industrious little rifler, nervously trampling about the brilliant and ambrosial chamber, covering its wings with the gilded dust, and loading its thighs with the concentrated aroma, and forthwith speeding away with its treasures and a soothing hum to search and plunder another flower. Honey dew, the well known material for the manufacture of the greater part of their honey, is not, as has been hitherto supposed, a real dew from air or earth, but an extravasated saccharine viscous fluid, flowing from the leaf, on which it is found, and being a portion of the secreted saccharine matter, which enters, more or less, into all vegetable formation.

There is another kind of honey dew, to which the ancients ascribed a celestial origin; but which is found to be, instead of the exhalations of the nectar and ambrosia of Mount Olympus, the excrement of a bug (puceron) and a filthy one too. The bee, little particular about the sources of its acquisitions, so that it gets honey, follows the track of the loathsome animal. The puceron extracts the saccharine material from barks or other sources, and emits it, as aforesaid, and the bees gather it up, and with very little, if any change by their assimilation, deposit the matter, thus acquired, which is forthwith the cleanest and most fragrant honey. There is nothing aristocratic, or particularly flattering in the origin of either man or honey.

By a very simple refining process, honey is converted into sugar, as white, but not so well chrystalized, as that from the cane. We have seen the French creoles convert common honey into a substance of a consistency and whiteness, resembling butter so nearly, that we mistook it for butter, by a process, which we understood to be the following. The honey is put into a close bag, and suspended, in clear and cool weather, as high as conveniently may be. It is left to filter through the bag, which it does in long fleaky drops, like threads, and to fall into large platters, where it is suffered to form but a thin surface. It is thus blanched, granulated, and as the common phrase is, candied. From pure honey and the washings of the comb, a hydromel is prepared, which, when filthily or unscientifically made, is a sufficiently execrable drink. But, when neatly and properly made, forms a rich and wholesome cordial drink, in flavor and strength not unlike Malvoisie wine.

Of the diseases and of the destroyers of bees it would be superfluous for us to speak. Our chief object in this notice has been, first to call public attention to the neat, useful and judicious compilation before us, in the hope that the author would be rewarded for his valuable and judicious labor; in the next place, to say a few words touching the elementary principles of bee raising. But lastly, and more than all, to call the attention of the American people, and especially in the interior, and more than all in the west, to this beautiful, important, and profitable species of domestic rural economy. What good reason can be given, why every farmer in the west should not have his apiary-his manufactory of nectar and ambrosia, rifling waters, woods and flowers of their sweets, by industrious little manufacturers, who cost him nothing, who gather rich plunder from the whole vegetable creation, injuring nothing, from which they extract their treasures; and which, instead of requiring painful toil, offer a source of innocent and rational pleasure-affording the lover of nature a study, a retirement, to which he will delight to repair, to forget the factitious creations, the frivolous pleasures, the self created wants of man, in contemplating the labors of these industrious animals, inhaling the aroma of their dwelling, soothing his ear with their incessant hum-marking their arrivals and departures, and seeing, in their perfect order, their admirable policy and their unerring instincts, the pointing of that finger that toucheth the stars, and they run their course rejoicing.

The Cincinnati Directory for 1829. By Robinson & Fairbank.

It gives us great pleasure to see such a useful and necessary book, extcuted with so much exactness and fidelity. The plan of the city is a most convenient and excellent appendage; and the whole work is finished with a praise-worthy labor and research, accuracy and detail, which assuredly merit, and we hope, will receive the sustained patronage of the public.

The Boston token for 1830. Edited by S. GOODRICH, and published by Carter and Hendee.

Boston.

Among the contributers to this volume, we notice the names of the most talented young men, and best known to fame in that division of the country, well understood to abound in disciplined and aspiring writers, who have a steady eye on the pinnacle of that temple, at the highest seat of which they are aiming. The vigorous and enterprising editor had no overwhelming influence of a thousand booksellers, no publisher of capital and resources sufficient to push any work, to aid him in his arduous undertaking. But we, the sovereign people, have an honorable impulse, sometimes to work against the stream; and we are told that this work has wonderfully succeeded.

We have neither space nor inclination for a detailed review of the articles. The Captain's Lady' is coarse and pointless; as is, still more so, the Height of Impudence,' introduced, it might seem, to show what a monstrous absurdity the brain could coin, or to weave into it a living, and, we hope we may add, a respectable name, in a manner in keeping only with a brainless boy throwing stones at decent passengers. The thankless task would be easy, to point out other blemishes. But the bestowment of merited praise is much more consonant to our inclinations; and we are pleased to be able to do this with a clear conscience and a full heart. The inspiring Address to the Ocean, and the eloquent inculcation of Submission to the will of Providence, are magnificent and befitting porticoes at the gate of ingress and departure; and impart chastened and pious associations at the commencement and close of the work. We were charmed with the editor's verses in the 'Token' of the past year, and still more so with those of this. We see in this writer another horn of power destined hereafter to push with Willis. Time would fail us, to pay our merited tribute to the greater number of the pieces. Where so many beautiful tales and poems succeed each other, it would seem almost invidious, to dwell particularly upon any one. There has been no volume of miscellaneous writings of this class superior, perhaps we might say equal to this, and the few unworthy pieces may possibly have been introduced with the customary acuteness of eastern management, to operate as foils, to reflect the brilliance and beauty of the other pieces to more advantage. The engravings strike us with pleasant effect; and they have one merit, apart from their intrinsic elegance, which cannot fail to make its interest with every genuine American. They are all by artists of our own country.

For the mechanical execution, the printing and paper, the chief essentials, are said to surpass those of any other annual. The external is in dove-colored silk, plain and yet rich, precisely the highest taste. We deem, that this noble simplicity of attire, renders it a much more appropriate present from a young gentleman to a young lady, than a book gaudier than butterfly or humming bird, which a real reader would fear to handle, and a nervous one to bring near gun powder. A book richly but modestly dressed is hieroglyphical. When presented to a young lady, it intimates, that the giver attributes to her the taste to prefer rich plainness to gaudy show, and has a conviction, that she values a book for its contents, rather

than its covers; in other words, that he aspires not to the character of a dandy, nor considers her as a vacant headed insect, to be caught with a piece of red morocco,

Elements of English Grammar, with progressive exercises in parsing. By JOHN FROST, principal of the Mayhew grammar school. Boston. Richardson & Lord. 1829.

This little book is on the model of Murray's abridged grammar, and in simplicity, and in being neither redundant, nor deficient, has decided advantages over that popular work. Every word tells in this treatise, and the young learner has not to commit a single word more, than is necessary. It is an absurd prejudice of our schools and of our day, to require the analysis of language, as an introduction to the knowledge of the language; in other words, that the pupil should analyze the language, before he has learned it. But so long as this fashion is followed, and followed it will be, it appears, for a long time yet to come, we recommend this grammar, as the easiest, most condensed, simple and useful introduction to a knowledge of our language and of parsing, that we have seen.

In this connection we take leave, also, to speak of Frost's Boston school edition of Paley's Moral and Political Philosophy, a neat and cheap edition, two volumes in one. It would be altogether supererrogation, to speak of this admirable work, so properly introduced, as an exercise, into our higher schools. The advantages of this edition are the convenience of the form, being 12 mo., and its containing at the close 35 pp. of questions, arranged at once for the advantage of the master and the pupil. It is a thing of some difficulty, requiring long practice, and no little study, to know, how to ask the most proper questions. They are here prepared to the master's and the pupil's hand, and will tend to render the study not only more easy, but more thorough and useful.

Discourse pronounced upon the inauguration of the Author, as Dane Professor of Law at Harvard University. By JOSEPH STORY. Hilliard, Gray, Little & Wilkins. Boston, 1829. pp. 60.

Mr. Dane of Beverly, Mass. a hoary veteran of the law, made a donation of ten thousand dollars, to found a professorship of law at Harvard University. Judge Story was appointed first professor, and this is his inaugural discourse. It partakes of the well known attributes of the eloquent mind of this distinguished gentleman. It is full to exuberance, simple and luminous; and one theme glides into another with smooth and grateful transition. The learned Judge, inducted into a professorship founded by a most laborious lawyer, of the old school, 'who had,' says

the author, 'for more than fifty years, devoted more than twelve hours a day to the study of law,' remembering, too, the condensed abridgements in 400 folio volumes, and the neat and compact little marriage contract in the appendix to Blackstone, of 48 close printed octavo pages, to be read as a damper, on the bridal day by the young candidates, and emulating the puritan fidelity of the ministers of pilgrim times, who held, that they had not given their hearers an honest ration of bread, till they had turned the second hour glass, enchained the attention of the audience, we are told, without their showing yawning or weariness, to mark the succession of ideas through sixty octavo pages. Higher tribute to the beauty and eloquence of the discourse could not have been given.

It opens by an eulogy of the study of law in its general principles, and the common law in particular. In pursuing this theme, every one in the least acquainted with the fullness of his mind, and the immensity of his reading, will readily anticipate, that a great number of fine remarks will be advanced, classical remembrances awakened, and ancient sages of the law laid under contribution for their most pithy sayings. Yet Judge Story, the very Jupiter Tonans of the old school bar, cannot refrain a sort of smile, even in this holiest place, and priesthood, and worship, as he recurs to some of the texts and doctrines of the immense Vedam of ancient jurisprudence; for instance, Bracton and Coke's reasons for the law of descent of estates; viz. because they are heavy, and go down on the principle of gravitation. Contingent titles in abeyance are most luminously said to be in gremio legis, vel in nubibus, in the bosom of the law or in the clouds. The doctrine of estate conveyed to trustees, for existing uses, and future contingent ones, is most lucidly defined scintilla juris, a spark of law, which kindles at the very moment the new uses spring into being. Stephens, in his lecture upon heads, and, more than all, in his famous case bullum v. boatum must have been, we think, in the mind's eye of the learned and eloquent professor at the same time. He could hardly have forgotten the ingenious device of laying the action in the county of Cornwall, when committed in the south seas, by which happy contrivance, the common law annihilateth space, if not time. We, the least learned in the mysteries of the law, have sometimes glanced an eye over the declaration in a case of libel, where 48 pages availed to bring before the court and jury, that defendant had called plaintiff a liar and an ass.

Every one has experienced a medicinal laugh, in reading or hearing the most admirable common law exposition of a case of suicide by the grave digger in Hamlet; and we express our thanks to the learned Judge, for referring us to the original of that parody, scarcely less inimitable, than the parody itself.

'Shakspeare has immortalized by his genius the report of a case in that book of painful learning, Plowden's Commentaries, in which Lady Margaret Hales, by the suicide of her husband, lost an estate by forfeiture to the crown, which she held jointly with him. One of the learned judges upon that occasion, in order to establish the legal conclusion, that the party killed himself in his lifetime, reasoned in this manner: "The felony is attributed to the act, which act is always done by a living man, and in his lifetime; for Sir James Hales was dead