admirable and instructive outline of the whole of biological science.* "Whoever," says Professor Huxley, "will follow its pages, crayfish in hand, and will try to verify for himself the statements which it contains, will find himself brought face to face with all the great zoological questions which excite so lively an interest at the present day; he will understand the method by which alone we can hope to attain satisfactory answers of these questions; and, finally, he will appreciate the justice of Diderot's remark, 'Il faut être profond dans l'art ou dans la science pour en bien posséder les éléments.'" Of course, within the dimensions of such a treatise, many of the larger problems can be only touched upon, and the way to approach them pointed out; but a right beginning is of the utmost importance in such matters, and Professor Huxley not only puts the student in complete possession of "the elements," but shows him how "the careful study of one of the commonest and most insignificant of animals leads us, step by step, from every-day knowledge to the widest generalizations of . . . biological science in general."

The method of exposition followed by Professor Huxley in the present case is the same as that adopted with such happy results in his previous work on "Physiography": beginning with the simple and particular he proceeds to the more complex and general-dealing first with the most commonplace facts of observation, then with the special law which governs the facts, then with the wider facts from which the special law was deduced, ascending gradually to those heights whence the fixed boundaries of human knowledge are clearly visible. In the opening chapter, the reader is confronted with what is called the common knowledge of the crayfishthat knowledge which is acquired by ordinary observers who may happen to see them in the streams which they frequent; and this leads up to "that accurate, but necessarily incomplete and unmethodized knowledge, which is understood by natural histo-, ry." In the two following chapters the physiology of the crayfish is discussed under two general heads: I. "The Mechanism by which the Parts of the Living Engine are supplied with the Materials necessary for their Maintenance and Growth"; 2. "The Mechanism by which the Living Organism adjusts itself to Surrounding Conditions and reproduces Itself." The fourth chapter treats of "The Morphology of the Common Crayfish: the Structure and the Development of the Individual"; and the fifth of the "Comparative Morphology of the Crayfish: the Structure and Development of the Crayfish compared with those of other Living Beings." Then comes, in the sixth chapter, a discussion of the geographical distribution of the crayfish, followed by a summary of what is known and may legitimately be conjectured concerning the etiology (or origin) of the crayfishes. A few notes at the end treat of

* The Crayfish. An Introduction to the Study of Zoology. By T. H. Huxley, F. R. S. With Eighty-two Illustrations. Vol. xxviii. International Scientific Series. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 12mo, pp. 371.

certain important points of detail that are only referred to in the text; and under the head of "Bibliography" are given “some references to the literature of the subject which may be useful to those who wish to follow it out more fully.”

This description or summary will convey a tolerably definite idea, perhaps, of the scope and general contents of the work; and a few passages which we may be able to detach from the close-knit exposition will serve to indicate its special features of interest. We mean, of course, those features which are special to this particular book, and not due simply to the author's lucid and luminous style. Everything that Professor Huxley writes has the charm of forcible argument and an incomparable clearness and vigor of expression; but the present work is illuminated more often than common with those quick flashes of sly and caustic humor that are characteristic of him-as where he says: "Crayfishes, in fact, are guilty of cannibalism in its worst form; ... and, not content with mutilating and killing their spouses, after the fashion of animals of higher moral pretensions, they descend to the lowest depths of utilitarian turpitude, and finish by eating them."

Perhaps as useful to the beginner in science as any other passage in the book is that in which Professor Huxley explains the reason and use of that technical nomenclature which is so difficult to master, and which, to many, seems so superfluous :

Many people imagine that scientific terminology is a needless burden imposed upon the novice, and ask us why we can not be content with plain English. In reply, I would suggest to such an objector to open a conversation about his business with a carpenter, or an engineer, or, still better, with a sailor, and try how far plain English will go. The interview will not have lasted long before he will find himself lost in a maze of unintelligible technicalities. Every calling has its technical terminology; and every artisan uses terms of art, which sound like gibberish to those who know nothing of art, but are exceedingly convenient to those who practice it. In fact, self; and, as the use of language is to convey our conevery art is full of conceptions which are special to itceptions to one another, language must supply signs for those conceptions. There are two ways of doing this: either existing signs may be combined in loose and cumbrous periphrases; or new signs, having a well-understood and definite signification, may be invented. The practice of sensible people shows the advantage of the latter course; and here, as elsewhere, science has simply followed and improved upon common sense.

ian artisans are under no particular necessity to discuss Moreover, while English, French, German, and Italthe processes and results of their business with one another, science is cosmopolitan, and the difficulties of the study of zoology would be prodigiously increased, if zoologists of different nationalities used different technical terms for the same thing. They need a universal language; and it has been found convenient that the language shall be Latin in form, and Latin or Greek in origin. What in English is Crayfish, is Ecrevisse in French; Flusskrebs in German; Cammaro or Gambaro in Italian; but the zoologist of each nationality knows that, in the scientific works of all the rest, he shall find what he wants to read under the head of Astacus fluviatilis.

If there are ten

But, granting the expediency of a technical name for the crayfish, why should that name be double? The reply is still, practical convenience. children of one family, we do not call them all Smith, because such a procedure would not help us to distinguish one from the other; nor do we call them simply John, James, Peter, William, and so on, for that would not help us to identify them as one family. So we give them all two names, one indicating their close relation, and the other their separate individuality-as John Smith, James Smith, Peter Smith, William Smith, etc. The same thing is done in zoology; only, in accordance with the genius of the Latin language, we put the Christian name, so to speak, after the surname.

In the same line and equally useful is the explanation given in a later chapter of the proper meaning of those much-debated and seldom-understood terms, "species,' ," "genus," and "family." After an extremely minute description of the common English crayfish, the author says:

The importance of this long enumeration of minute details will appear by and by. It is simply a statement of the more obvious external characters in which all the English crayfishes which have come under my notice agree. No one of these individual crayfishes was exactly like the other; and, to give an account of any single crayfish as it existed in nature, its special peculiarities must be added to the list of characters given above; which, considered with the facts of structure discussed in previous chapters, constitutes a definition, or diagnosis, of the Englisn kind, or species, of crayfish. It follows that the species, regarded as the sum of the morphological characters in question and nothing else, does not exist in nature; but that it is an abstraction, obtained by separating the structural characters in which the actual existences the individual crayfishes-agree from those in which they differ, and neglecting the latter. A diagram, embodying the totality of the structural characters thus determined by observation to be common to all our crayfishes, might be constructed; and it would be a picture of nothing which ever existed in nature; though it would serve as a very complete plan of the structure of all the crayfishes which are to be found in this country. The morphological definition of a species is, in fact, nothing but a description of the plan of structure which characterizes all the individuals of that species.

This is followed by a description of the Californian and other species of crayfish, in so far as they differ from the English species; and then comes the following passage:

All the individual crayfish referred to thus far have been sorted out, first into the groups termed species; and then these species have been further sorted into two divisions, termed genera. Each genus is an abstraction, formed by summing up the common characters of the species which it includes, just as each species is an abstraction, composed of the common characters of the individuals which belong to it; and the one has no more existence in nature than the other. The definition of the genus is simply a statement of the plan of structure which is common to all the species included under that genus; just as the definition of the species is a statement of the common plan of structure which runs throughout the individuals which compose the species.

crayfishes which are found in the fresh waters of the southern hemisphere, and which differ from the English crayfish still more widely than do the American kinds; and then adds:

The southern crayfishes, like those of the northern hemisphere, are divisible into many species; and these species are susceptible of being grouped into six genera ... on the same principle as that which has led to the grouping of the northern forms into two genera. But the same convenience which has led to the association of groups of similar species into genera has given rise to the combination of allied genera into higher groups, which are termed families. It is obvious that the definition of a family, as a statement of the characters in which a certain number of genera agree, is another morphological abstraction, which stands in the same relation to generic as generic do to specific abstractions. Moreover, the definition of the family is a statement of the plan of all the genera comprised in that family.

It will be seen by the attentive reader that this involves much more than a mere definition of certain scientific terms. If accepted as correct, it really settles one of the crucial questions at issue between the advocates of evolution and the upholders of the doctrine of special creations. And it may be added that, at many points, the book trenches upon this debatable land of science, some of whose problems are encountered at almost every stage in the study of zoology. Any close examination of the comparative anatomy of the crayfish reveals the fact that one "plan of organization" is common to a multitude of animals of extremely diverse outward forms and habits. Remarking upon this, Professor Huxley says:

Nothing would be easier, were the occasion fitting, than to extend this method of comparison to the whole of the several thousand species of crab-like, crayfish-like, or prawn-like animals, which, from the fact that they all have their eyes set upon movable stalks, are termed the Podophthalmia, or stalk-eyed Crustacea; and by arguments of similar force to prove that they are all modifications of the same common plan. Not only so, but the sand-hoppers of the seashore, the wood-lice of the land, and the water-fleas or the monoculi of the ponds, nay, even such remote forms as the barnacles which adhere to floating wood, and the acorn-shells which crowd every inch of rock on many of our coasts, reveal the same fundamental organization. Further than this, the spiders and the scorpions, the millipeds and the centipeds, and the multitudinous legions of the insect world, show us, amid infinite diversity of detail, nothing which is new in principle to any one who has mastered the morphology of the crayfish. Given a body divided into somites, each with a pair of appendages; and given the power to modify those somites and their appendages in strict accordance with the principles by which the common plan of the Podophthalmia is modified in the actually existing members of the order; and the whole of the Arthropoda, which probably make up two thirds of the animal world, might readily be educed from one primitive form,

Nor does the apparent unity of animated nature cease when the entire animal kingdom has been included:

made up of various kinds of tissues, such as pith, woody fiber, spiral vessels, ducts, and so on. But even the most modified forms of vegetable tissue depart so little from the type of the simple cell [which Professor Huxley elsewhere defines as a particle of simple living matter, or

protoplasm, in the midst of which is a rounded body termed a nucleus], that the reduction of them all to a common type is suggested still more strongly than in the case of the animal fabric. And thus the nucleated cell appears to be the morphological unit of the plant no less than of the animal. Moreover, recent inquiry has shown that, in the course of the multiplication of vegetable cells by division, the nuclear spindles may appear and run through all their remarkable changes by stages precisely

similar to those which occur in animals.

The question of the universal presence of nuclei in cells may be left open in the case of plants, as in that of animals; but, speaking generally, it may justly be affirmed that the nucleated cell is the morphological foundation of both divisions of the living world; and the great generalization of Schleiden and Schwann, that there is a fundamental agreement in structure and development between plants and animals, has, in substance, been merely confirmed and illustrated by the labors of the half century which has elapsed since its promulgation.

We have exhausted our space without finding room for all (or even nearly all) of the striking passages which we had marked; but those we have quoted will suffice to show how important, and how varied in interest, are the subjects which the book discusses. It only remains to add that the volume is copiously and admirably illustrated-quite a number of the eighty-two engravings being, as Professor Huxley says in his preface, "excellent specimens of the xylographic art."

It is not only in the incisiveness and subtilty of his criticism that Mr. Henry James, Jr., shows the effects of his French studies and Parisian experiences. These effects are hardly more traceable in his essays on the French poets and novelists than in his more distinctly creative and original work, and it must be admitted that they are more conspicuous than ever in his latest, and in some respects best, novel, “Confidence."* We are not going to impair the reader's enjoyment of this piquant and graceful

story by revealing its plot or dénouement; but we

shall make no unfair disclosures if we say that the

situation at the close is decidedly "French" in character and manner. There is nothing specifically objectionable about it, certainly nothing "immoral," as the phrase goes; yet the unassisted Teutonic imagination would hardly have conceived quite such a complication or exactly such a method of disentanglement. It is said that in the most elevated stratum of French society, a certain surprise, not unmingled with amusement, is felt at finding that a man is in love with his own wife instead of with somebody else's. This sentiment by no means finds expression in "Confidence"; and yet it required a certain easy fumiliarity with this sentiment - with the French

*Confidence. A Novel. By Henry James, Jr. Boston: Houghton, Osgood & Co. 12mo, pp. 347.

view of the possible relations between men and women- to enable Mr. James to write the closing chapters of his story with such serene unconsciousness of there being anything unusual or unnatural the situation is scarcely complicated enough to pique about them. To the experienced Parisian, perhaps, the attention; but, to the unsophisticated and somewhat prudish Saxon imagination there is something repellent and distasteful in the attitude of the several parties toward one another just before the event which makes every one happy ever after.

Another comment which "Confidence" seems to

suggest is, that Mr. James is losing his hold more and more upon the solid realities and permanent interests of life. "Roderick Hudson" presented a group of clearly defined and perfectly intelligible characters in a situation which, if unusual, was at least easily conceived and ardently sympathized with. In "The American," the characters deviated more widely from the ordinary types, and the situation was almost grotesquely artificial; while in "The Europeans" the incongruousness and lack of adjustment between the leading characters and their surroundings constituted the main interest of the story. In "Confidence" the characters are intelligible enough and inspire a sympathetic interest; but they are curiously disconnected from all those incidents, attachments, and surroundings which serve to give background and reality to a character. They seem to be moving in a sort of vacuum; and no opportunity is afforded for that association of ideas, so to call it, by which we identify and localize a person, whether in real life or in fiction.

The truth is, that Mr. James has confined himself of late to the study and portraiture of dilettanti leading more or less consciously the vacant, detached lives of dilettanti. given to scale the heights or to penetrate the depths To such, of course, it is not of life, or even to march sanely along those broad levels which are interesting because of the countless numbers of human creatures who must tread them. For this reason, the artist who deals with them must avoid all definite and pronounced colors, all contrasts of light and shade, all depth of tone or energy of expression. And this is the reason why Mr. James's love—and he is always dealing more or less directly with love and love-making — is a pallid,

bloodless, conversational sort of an emotion, which never really agitates or dominates the man or woman into whose consciousness it is supposed to insinuate itself. No doubt much refinement of art may be displayed in portraying such persons and their milieu; but, after a prolonged diet of them, one feels as

if he would gladly exchange them all for one single broadly human Jeems Yellowplush or Matilda Ann. In thinking of this, a passage from one of Charles den in the memory: "The more we see of life and Dickens's recently published "Letters" rises unbidits brevity," he says, "and the world and its vari

eties, the more we know that no exercise of our abilities in any art, but the addressing of it to the great ocean of humanity in which we are drops, and not to by-ponds (very stagnant) here and there, ever

can or ever will lay the foundations of an endurable retrospect." Not only so, but there is no other solid foundation for a genuine and enduring fame.

If the foregoing appears to the reader to have taken a too fault-finding tone, it is all the more incumbent upon us to say that no defects that may be pointed out in Mr. James's work can or should prevent cultivated readers from deriving from it a very refined and exquisite enjoyment. Regarded as what Matthew Arnold calls "an artist in words," Mr. James seems to us entitled to perhaps the highest rank among contemporary novelists who use the English language as a vehicle of expression; and in this respect "Confidence" is a distinct advance upon its predecessors. There are passages, sentences, and phrases in it which are literally too good to be imbedded in a narrative the interest of which is likely to distract the attention from everything else; and the entire work bears testimony to the conscientious painstaking of a writer who respects himself and his readers too much not to take the trouble to present them with the finished fabric instead of the raw material of the novelist's art.

ONE of the most curious and characteristic phenomena of French social life is the extravagance of homage that is offered at the shrine of a successful littérateur or man of letters, not only by his followers and disciples, but by that portion of the public which in other countries reserves its admiration for more showy if not more vulgar forms of success. The victorious general or the "eminent statesman" secures nothing in the way of public recognition that can be compared with the sort of idolatrous worship inspired by a Chateaubriand, a Lamartine, or a Hugo; and the two latter may be said to have made the nearest approach that our modern modes of thinking will permit to that deification during life

which the Roman world reserved for its Cæsars. There is an admirable side to this, of course, and a Frenchman is entirely justified in regarding it as a testimony to his higher civilization that his profoundest homage is reserved for achievements of the mind; but there is a side of it which is not admirable, and this side seems to be reached when the attitudes and the phrases that are graceful enough, perhaps, in the salon or the sanctum of the poet, are carried into the cooler atmosphere and calmer moods which should "assist" at the making of a book. M. Henri de Lacretelle was the life-long friend and disciple of Lamartine, and one turns with the zest of anticipated enjoyment to the confidences he has chosen to impart concerning "Lamartine and his Friends"; but when we find him speaking of Lamartine as "an Olympian god" and "a second Plato," and declaring that "there ought to be a Bible written on the Acts of Lamartine," we are led not merely to question the validity of the author's

* Lamartine and his Friends. By Henri de Lacretelle. Translated from the French by Maria E. Odell. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. 16mo, pp. 329.

own testimony, but to distrust in a measure the personality that inspired it. We feel that, if the influence of Lamartine had been thoroughly wholesome, it should have tempered and restrained the enthusiastic vagaries of the devotee.

And this leads us to the remark (which M. de Lacretelle would probably attribute to our Saxon obtuseness and lack of sympathy) that, in our opinion-an opinion that is confirmed rather than refuted by the disclosures of the present work—there was something hopelessly shallow, and vain, and theatrical about Lamartine's character. Standing (in his own eyes, at least, and in those of his friends) on the topmost pinnacle of Parnassus, he permitted himself to envy the laurels of the statesman, and was never content until he had descended into the miasmatic marshes of politics; having undermined and shaken down the throne, he lost faith in and denounced the republic as soon as he discovered that he himself was not to be its leader; and, while squandering an ample fortune, and bringing those dependent upon him to penury, he never ceased avowing his conviction that Providence had designed him for a financier. He resembled Goldsmith in the heedless profusion of his expenditure and giving, but he lacked that charming simplicity of character which endears Goldsmith to us through his very faults. Goldsmith squandered by reason of weaknesses which are almost amiable in their unselfishness: Lamartine squandered because he considered profusion becoming in a Lamartine, and because he felt a proud consciousness that the world owed Lamartine whatever portion of its lucre he might choose to demand.

disclosures concerning such a character and life, the less likely they are to please; and, certainly, M. de Lacretelle's reminiscences of Lamartine will have a very different effect, outside of France at least, from what he seems to anticipate. It should be said, however, that part of the unsatisfactoriness of the work is due to the author's own point of view and faults of method. It seems impossible for a French biographer to set down, with the necessary candor and impartiality, those minute personal details and items of talk and correspondence which give their chief charm to the best English works in this field: he idealizes the character which he undertakes to portray, and every

It follows, of course, that the more intimate the

thing is made to vindicate or illustrate the ideal so formed. This fault is very conspicuous in M. de Lacretelle's reminiscences of Lamartine and his friends, and is sufficient to render the book a disappointing one, even when we acquit the author of those awkwardnesses and infelicities of language which are probably due to lack of skill on the part of his translator.

MR. FROUDE'S early training and experience as a theologian would necessarily prove very useful to him in such a task as writing the life of John Bunyan; and the book in which he has written it might fairly puzzle a cataloguer who guided himself by the contents of a volume rather than by its title in decid