of view. Mr. Hall's sympathetic nature fitted him for this difficult
task; and having accomplished it well, he is enabled, by his vivid
descriptions, to invite the reader to see what he saw, and to sit by the
"Innuit" fireside. We must confess, however, it is looking at the world
from a very _blubber-y_ point of view; but since it is in the cause of
science and humanity, we rise from the reading, which is extremely
interesting, with a high respect for Mr. Hall and renewed faith in the
result of his undertaking.
In so short a space there is no room for extracts, yet without them we
can give little idea of the simple, picturesque character of the
narrative. Mr. Hall took the Innuits by the hand as brothers, not as
savages, and the result is large because of his wisdom.
1. _La Fiera._ Commedia in Cinque Atti. Di ALBERTO NOTA. Con
Note Inglesi. Boston: De Vries, Ibarra e Compagnia.
2. _La Rosa dell' Alpi._ Novella di FRANCESCO DALL' ONGARO.
Con Note Inglesi. Boston: De Vries, Ibarra e Compagnia.
The author of an agreeable article in the "North American Review,"
entitled "Recent Italian Comedy," says that the plays of Alberto Nota
are no longer acted or reprinted. The American press straightway refutes
him by a neat edition of the comedy of "The Fair," with notes for
English readers. It is an entertaining little production, in spite of
the above critic, having rather effective incidents and situations, and
easy, if not brilliant, dialogue. The plot may be described as being
French, and the moral as English; that is, the jealous wife outwits the
faithless husband, instead of the opposite result.
The "Collection De Vries" also introduces to us the more familiar and
contemporary name of Dall' Ongaro, to whom the critics attribute more
dramatic genius than is conceded to any other living poet of Italy. The
story of "La Rosa dell' Alpi" is simply and beautifully written, and
paints the innocent career of a poor servant--maiden with something of
the grace of George Sand.
It will be a good thing for students to read these specimens of easy
colloquial Italian; so that they need not, when they visit the
beloved-land, do their shopping exclusively in Dantean phrases, as Mrs.
Siddons shopped in Shakspeare.
_A Treatise on Ordnance and Armor, with an Appendix relating
to Gun-Cotton, Hooped Guns, etc._ By ALEXANDER L. HOLLEY, B.
P. New York: Van Nostrand.
King James I. is reported to have said of iron armor, that it was an
excellent thing: one could get no harm, in it, nor do any. Yet armor has
had but a brief respite from service; banished temporarily from human
backs, it is being restored for more wholesale service: it is extended
over ships and fortifications, and so thickened as to resist shot and
shell. The very title of this book marks the progress in the history of
war. Hereafter ordnance and armor are two correlatives, never to be
considered apart. The progress in offensive and defensive improvements
keeps the balance of fighting humanity pretty nearly even thus far; as
in the development of a young lobster the claws and cuirass grow
simultaneously.
Will ships or guns prove the stronger at last? No one can foresee. A
single fifteen-inch ball from the Monitor Weehawken disabled the
iron-clad Atlanta at three hundred yards, where eleven-inch balls had
fallen powerless from the armor. A similar missile shattered the sides
of the Tennessee, penetrating five inches of iron and two feet of oak,
against which all other shot had failed. What can resist such balls? A
mere pile of sand can resist them, if there are spades enough to carve
it into a fort; but as sand cannot be carved into a ship, we must resort
to new devices there. The larger the ship, the greater the danger; so
suppose we try making it smaller. Let us concentrate our ordnance and
our armor: put thicker plating on our Monitor of eight hundred tons than
the Warrior of six thousand can support, and place near the centre of
motion of the little vessel two heavier guns than the weighty one can
carry in broadside out upon her capacious ribs. This game of giants is
growing formidable; and with such a concentration of skill and power,
the fate of nations may be determined by a single blow.
Other novel questions come up, as we carry our researches farther. Try
your strength by throwing a small cannon-ball at a thin board-partition;
you will find that the missile will split or crush the board, but not
penetrate it. Fire a bullet at the same target, and it will penetrate,
but neither crush nor split. Balance a plank on its edge, so that a
pistol-ball thrown from the hand will knock it down; you may yet riddle
it through and through by the same balls from a revolver, and leave it
standing. Bring this commonplace fact to bear upon the question, how to
destroy an iron-clad; shall we destroy it by punching holes through it,
or by splitting and crushing? It is a difficult problem, and many pages
of Mr. Holley's book are devoted to the discussion of the light-shot and
the heavy-shot systems.
For these problems, and such as these, we need a new military
literature, embodying the vast results which a few years of foreign
experiment and home experience have furnished. We need a scientific
treatise on the whole subject of ordnance, regarding, for instance, the
strains of different charges and projectiles in large and small bores,
and the work done by projectiles and by cannon-metals having different
properties, under statical and sudden strains. This want Mr. Holley's
book does not undertake to fill, being in its structure somewhat
diffuse, and, as it were, of unequal expansion: the object being rather
to furnish the maximum of material for a systematic treatise, than to
write the treatise itself.
It has therefore the inestimable merits, and also some of the defects,
of a pioneer compilation. On many subordinate points, the details are
multiplied almost to weariness, while on some points more important
there are hardly any details at all. But this is simply because the
author could obtain the one class of facts and not the other. It is a
faithful registration, and the only one, of a vast multitude of
experiments and observations, which were absolutely inaccessible in any
other form. It is said to cause much wonder in England how its English
facts and statistics were obtained at all; and it is certain that Mr.
Holley must have used his opportunities of personal observation in a
manner worthy of the curiosity attributed to his race. We have in this
book the substantial results of the vast and costly English experiments;
while the more momentous results of our own practice, so familiar to
us, seem still unfamiliar across the water. This gives our nation a
great advantage, and renders it impossible to produce, at present, in
Europe, a work so encyclopaedic as this. It is not merely the best book,
but the only book, on the theme it treats: there is no other account of
the structure and results of modern standard ordnance. That it is the
work of a civil engineer, and not of a military or naval man, gives it
an additional interest; and the author may have owed to his position
some foreign opportunities which would have been refused to an officer.
The book is printed in the usual superb style of Van Nostrand, and is in
all respects an honor to the literature of the country.
_Historical View of the American Revolution._ By GEORGE
WASHINGTON GREENE. Boston: Ticknor & Fields.
Either of the two objects which Mr. Greene aimed to accomplish in
preparing the materials of this volume demanded on his part the
possession of large historical knowledge, and the best abilities for its
judicious use. The contents of the volume were made to do service,
first, as a series of twelve lectures before the Lowell Institute,
addressed to a large and mixed audience, possessing generally a high
average of intelligence, and exhibiting, by their voluntary presence, an
interest on which a lecturer may largely rely. The second object of the
author, in the present publication of his Lectures, was to contribute to
the best form of our popular literature a volume which may be regarded
either as introductory to, or as a substitute for, an extended course of
reading on its subject-matter, according to the leisure and capacity of
those who may possess themselves of it. We must congratulate alike the
lecturer and the author for very marked success in the adaptation of his
materials and in the treatment of his subject so as to answer equally
well the wants of good listeners and of sympathetic readers.
The great perplexity of a lecturer, who has given him an hour on twelve
evenings, two in a week, for dealing before a mixed audience with such a
subject as the American War of Independence, must be in deciding for
himself, without consultation with his hearers, how much previous
knowledge he may take for granted in them. He cannot name his
authorities, much less quote them to any great extent. On some vexed
points the simple fact that sharp and dividing issues of controverted
opinions have been agitated about them must virtually compel him almost
to pass them wholly by, seeing that he cannot adequately discuss them,
and that any brief and positive utterance upon them would seem to be
lacking in judicial fairness. The exigencies and temptations of a
lecture-room are also sadly provocative of that rhetorical bombast and
exaggeration which, having been so lavishly and offensively indulged on
our Fourth of July and other commemorative occasions in the supposed
interests of popular patriotism, have brought our whole national
literature under a reproach hardly deserved. Mr. Greene, from his long
residence abroad, has heard and known too much of this reproach to have
risked getting even under the shadow of it.
We believe it is a well-established fact, that both in oral and in
literary dealings with historical subjects, the more thorough and
comprehensive the knowledge possessed by any one who proposes to
instruct others, the more concisely as well as the more correctly will
he present his matter. He knows how to adjust the proportions of
interest in his main and incidental themes. By this test we should judge
Mr. Greene to be most faithfully conversant with his subject, and to
have had his knowledge stored up in his mind, uncommunicated, long
enough to have well digested and assimilated it. The admirable division
of his theme for treatment under twelve distinct, though closely related
topics, shows something better than ingenuity, or a skilful arrangement
of a bill of fare for twelve entertainments. These topics are,--The
Causes of the Revolution; Its Phases; The Congress; Congress and the
State Governments; Finances of the Revolution; Its Diplomacy; Its Army;
Its Campaigns; The Foreign Element of the Revolution; Its Martyrs; Its
Literature, in Prose; and in Poetry. An Appendix gives us a
Chronological Outline of Historical Events; Statistical Tables; and an
Address of Officers of the Southern Army to General Greene.
For completeness' sake, we could have wished that the author, if not the
lecturer, might have indulged himself, and pleased and instructed his
readers, by presenting under one more topic, or under a miscellaneous
category, the resources of the American Colonies at the date of the
Revolution, what they had besides land and water; the characteristics
of the diverse elements of the population; the manufacturing interests,
which had begun to be ingeniously and effectively pursued here,
notwithstanding the repressive hostility of England to their
introduction; and the distinctive qualities of our farmers, sea-men,
professional men, and village politicians. But it is ungracious to ask
for more than there is in this compact and most admirable volume. It is
written with a severely good taste, in a spirit of candor and
generosity, with stern fidelity to truth in relating things honorable
and humiliating; and it will surely excite to wide and diligent reading
those who through its pages make their first acquaintance with its
subject. There are in it many finely drawn and artistic portraits of men
of mark, especially of Franklin, Lafayette, Steuben, James Otis, and
Josiah Quincy. In no single volume can foreign readers find what is here
told so fully, so simply, and so well.
_Lectures on the Science of Language._ By MAX MUeLLER, M. A.
Second Series. New York: Charles Scribner.
Voltaire defined Etymology as a science where vowels signify nothing and
consonants very little. This is so far true that even the wisest books
on Language affect one, after all, like a series of brilliant puns. More
important merits than this must, no doubt, be attributed to Max Mueller;
but, after all, so wayward is he and so whimsical, such a lover of
paradox and of digression, that he must perpetually exasperate that
sedate race of men whom Philology is supposed to have peculiarly chosen
for its own. In this second series of Lectures, especially, "we have
been at a great feast of languages, and have stolen the scraps."
Beginning the volume mildly with a demure introduction, we suddenly are
over head and ears in "dialectic regeneration," which seems like
theology, only that it introduces us to a mild baby-talk in that
wonderful language, the Annamitic, where the sentence "ba ba ba ba"
means, "Three ladies gave a box on the ear to the favorite of the
prince." Then comes Bishop Wilkins's "universal language," then a
discussion of Locke, then the theory of harmonics, and then many pages
of anatomical plates. Then phonetic changes; followed by a chapter on
"Grimm's Law," which would give work enough for a lifetime. We next
plunge into botany, and have a whole chapter on the "words for fir, oak,
and beech," which shows that the author, like our own Mr. Marsh, has
studied the literal roots as well as the symbolic. Later, we come to
astronomy, whence one of our author's favorite theories conducts us into
the Greek mythology, to which two whole lectures are given. Then comes
another chapter, tracing the "myths of the dawn" still farther back
toward the dim origin of the Aryan race; and the book closes with a
chapter on Modern Mythology, of which some twenty pages are given to an
exhaustive treatise, anatomical and historical, on the Barnacle Goose.
This brings us round handsomely to Locke and Sir William Hamilton once
more, and there leaves us.
What change has come over the accomplished and eloquent man who was
wisely transplanted to England to teach us Anglo-Saxons what scholarship
meant, and who made his first series of Lectures a model of clever and
effective statement? He congratulates himself, in the introduction to
this volume, on having left out all that was merely elementary. This is
true in respect to philology, perhaps, but he has certainly contrived to
introduce the elements of a great many other sciences. No matter; he
stated in the first volume all the principal points with which his
reputation is identified; and it is very entertaining, though somewhat
unexpected, to find the new one filled with all manner of spicy
prolusions--mingled with a few delusions--from his commonplace book.
Certainly the learning of these Lectures is unequalled, even by his
former exhibitions in that line; and our Cisatlantic standard of
attainment seems rather scanty beside this vast affluence.
There is also a certain wayward, heroic, Ruskin-like self-contradiction
about Mueller, which one learns rather to enjoy. He claims that "all
phonetic corruption proceeds from degeneracy," and yet has presently to
shield himself behind the paradoxical proverb, that "lazy people take
the most trouble," and so the corrupted vocables are often harder to
speak. He says repeatedly that "sound etymology has nothing to do with
sound"; yet he approves phonography, holding that spelling signifies
even less than sound,--which is contrary to the usual opinion of
philologists. Nevertheless his book is "full of the seeds of things"; no
one else could have written it, and no one can afford not to read it.