prentices in their particular trades, such as that of the Railroad Printing Office in Paris, and the Iron Works at Creuzot, the report gives a full description. Sunday schools were first established in Milan, by St. Charles Borromeo, in 1564, and it did not take long before Cambray, Lille, Worms and other towns, also opened schools on Sundays—not as in England and this country, for purely religious instruction, but for such partial studies as are now taught in night schools. In other countries these are not limited to merely elementary subjects; for in Holland women are taught pharmacy, book-keeping, wood and straw work, and other useful arts; in Austria, telegraphing is added to the other subjects taught in 1871-2 to nearly five thousand female pupils; while Prussia, as a sort of reward for the thorough technical instruction freely given, now opens its telegraph, post-office and railroads, its libraries and civil service, to women. In 1875 Public libraries for popular use are now admitted to be almost a necessary supplement to any good system of education. France had five thousand libraries with 180,000 volumes in 1865. it had 15,000 libraries and a million and a half of books. Switzerlond has effected the same result without government aid, and its 1734 libraries, with a million of volumes, supply an average of forty volumes to every hundred inhabitants. Belgium has five associations maintained by workingmen, with libraries, schools, popular, literary and scientific lecturers; and in almost all other European countries, such associations have had a much more wholesome influence than those established by private munificence. The great question to be asked and taught by an Exhibition relate to the number of children receiving public education, the number of schools, classes and teachers, the cost per head, the attendance; in short, the quantity and quality of instruction, the sacrifice made to secure it, and the results. The National Bureau of Education is almost the only authority for statistics on these subjects for a whole nation. In the main, the great citities give their own details, each for itself, and there is a great need of a uniform system to show at a glance the results. M. Levasseur drew up a table showing the average school attendance to the whole population; but even this, with all his skill and care, is only approximate. To make an exhibition a satisfactory test of the existing education of the nations here represented, there must be a full and complete interchange of views, and a plan of statistics on a common basis. J. G. R. NEW BOOKS. SOLAR INVESTIGATIONS, 1875. By Captain John Ericsson, LL. D. CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE CENTENNIAL EXHIBITION. By Captain John Ericsson, LL. D. It is matter for regret, having regard to the true purpose of the Centennial Exposition-namely, the celebration of a nation's hundredth year by bringing together in international rivalry the results of a century of progress that Captain John Ericsson, the designer of the Ericsson caloric ship, and of the monitor turret system of naval construction and armament, was not invited, with other leading scientists, to show what advances science has practically made. Captain Ericsson, however, instead of uselessly complaining, tells us what he could for himself have shown, and describes his discoveries and inventions in a couple of privately-printed monographs, entitled Solar Investigations, 1875, and Contributions to the Centennial Exhibition. The first of these works is sufficiently novel in the matter of which it treats to be briefly and carefully reduced into the language of the people. The great engineer has not forgotten his old love, the caloric engine; but on the other hand, believes that the future exhaustion of the coal measures will render it of practically universal utility, since it will need only the sun-power now wasted on rainless lands to set it in operation for the benefit of mankind, in lieu of the already increasingly costly element of steam produced by the burning of fuel. But with an intuition of what may be a century hence, he seeks to gauge the thermal energy transmitted to the earth by the sun's rays; and this he effects by apparatus of an unique character. He takes a telescopic tube, devoid of lenses, etc., mounts it equatorially, and closes both ends with metallic plates or diaphragms. Then he cuts three circular apertures in each of these diaphragms; two of the three correspond in diameter; the third differs, and is, moreover, placed on one or the other side of the vertical line. Plates being concentrically inserted in two of the apertures of the upper diaphragm, he gets observations of the rays transmitted by the whole area of the sun's disc, by a narrow zone on the border of the disc, and by the centre of the disc; which rays, forming a hollow cone, pass through the corresponding apertures of the lower diaphragm, and are measured as to their relative intensity by actinometers of Ericsson's contrivance-placed beneath. The recorded results are curiously interesting, and seem to set at rest the dubious speculations of Laplace, Secchi, and other astronomers of that school; and they support the notions of the photosophere propounded by Norman Lockyer. As to the commercial aspects of these investigations, those, too, are of vast importance, if it be correct, as the author states, that the scorched plains bordering the Nile and the Red Sea have heat enough pouring from the blazing sun during nine hours daily, to keep in constant working the mills of a hundred such cities as Manchester. One might almost assume that it was intended by Providence and the engineer thus to vindicate the wisdom of the Derby-Disraeli policy, of gaining an alternative resort midway between the British Isles and India, where the dream of an Oriental empire might be realized in the very cradleland of civilization, by the hardy sons of the vigorous North-West of Europe. A FAMILY TREE: By Albany de Fonblanque. This story is unusual in respect of form, as two hundred and fifty years intervene between the first and second parts. The first part contains the roots, the second the fruits of the family tree of the Desmonds; and, though the interest is well sustained through the whole, the power of the tale is in the first part. In it we are taken back to the day when James I. was King, and men's belief in witches more sincere than the author would have us think when he says: "There were many official witch-finders, and, consequently, no lack of witches. People must live!" When we read of a too accomplished horse tried and executed for sorcery at Lisbon in 1601, we see the absurdity of this witch-mania, and perhaps forget the terror with which it overspread Europe for four hundred years. From 1484, when armed with the Malleus Maleficarum, the official witch-finders of Innocent VIII. began their work in Germany, down to the last judicial execution for witchcraft, which took place in the grand duchy of Posen in 1793, the records are appalling. In Geneva five hundred were burned in three months. Under the Long Parliament three thousand were condemned. James I. and his bride having been tempest-tossed on their voyage from Denmark, investigations were made which resulted in the execution of thirty persons for having, by sorcery, raised the elements against the King. In 1716 Mistress Hicks and daughter, aged nine, were hanged in England "for selling their souls to the devil, and raising a storm by pulling off their stockings and making a lather of soap." One cannot think so ill of human nature as to believe these things possible among men who had not a sincere belief in the existence of the evil they sought to exterminate. Envy and malice certainly may have prompted individual prosecutions, but the mass of mankind are not moved to spontaneous action by such feelings. In a day when the weight and talent of both church and bar were thrown against these unfortunates, it is grateful to remember a little book of Reginald Scot, which he wrote "Anno 1584, for the protection of poor and ignorant people, frequently taken, arraigned, condemned and executed for witches, when, according to a right understanding and a good conscience, Physick, Food and Necessaries should be administered." How far above the general understanding these generous sentiments were Mr. de Fonblanque shows us in Part I.; while in Part II. all the troubles are set straight by the hereditary fidelity of the Denys family, who hold in sacred trust the estate for the heirs of a Desmond, whose son is stolen in the earlier history. The good deeds of these men live after them, their unwavering loyalty is rewarded by the discovery of the heirs, and the telling of the story leaves a pleasant memory. BOOKS RECEIVED. History of Europe. By E. A. Freeman, D. C. L., LL. D. History Primers. (Edited by J. R. Green.) 18mo., cloth, pp. 150. With maps. New York. D. Appleton & Co. [Porter & Coates.] The Five Senses of Man. By Julius Bernstein. International Scientific Series. 12mo., cloth, pp. 322. Illustrated. New York: D. Appleton & Co. [Porter & Coates.] Goethe's Prose. Edited by James Morgan Hart. German Classics, No. 3. 16mo., cloth. $1.00. Pp. 199. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. [Porter & Coates.] My Own Child. By Florence Marryatt. 8vo. Paper, 75 cents. Pp. 181. Fifty Years of My Life. By George Thomas, Earl of Albemarle. 12mo., cloth. $2.50. Pp. 430. New York: Henry Holt & Co. [Porter & Coates.] Theory of Social Organization. By Charles Fourier. With an introduction by Albert Brisbane. Sociological Series, No. 2. 12mo., cloth. $1.50. Pp. 288. New York: C. P. Somerby. [Claxton, Remsen and Haffelfinger.] The Ethics of Benedict de Spinoza. From the Latin. With an introductory sketch of his life and writings. 8vo., cloth. $3.00. Pp. 376. New York: D. Van Nostrand. [J. B. Lippincott & Co.] 1 And it is to the honor of the Jesuit order that their genial poet Frederick Spee published in 1632 his Cautio Criminalis, sive de Processibus contra Sagas Liber. His contemporary, the Calvinistic lawyer Johann Althusen, opposed the superstition in his writings, and was also ahead of his times in asserting the sovereignty of the people. Later opponents of this judicial superstition are John Webster, a theologian of the school of Sir Harry Vane and a chaplain in the Long Parliament's army, who practiced medicine in Lancashire after the Restoration; and then Dr. Francis Hutcheson, the Scotchman who rediscovered the existence of a moral sense or conscience in mankind.-Ed. THE PENN MONTHLY. THE NOVEMBER, 1876. HE Eastern complication is approaching what we are sorry to regard as the only desirable solution, viz., the invasion of Turkey by Russia, and the involving Eastern Europe in a great conflict between the Mohammedan and the Christian. The Russian is not the sort of government we especially admire ; and while we readily understand, we by no means share the sympathy which many Americans entertain for it. We regard it as a despotism, whose power retards the political development of a great cluster of nations, and especially as a despotism which alone, of all monarchical despotisms, has avowed sympathies with that despotism of the many, that negation of all freedom and individuality-communism. The extension of the Czar's empire to the Bosphorus and beyond it, the conversion of the Black sea into a Russian lake, and the extinction of the partial independence of the Danubian provinces and their Russification, we regard as little less than disasters to Europe at large. But since the rest of the Great Powers have failed to do their duty to Christendom and to humanity, Russia has fairly earned her great opportunity to gain the long-coveted site of empire, the New Rome of eastern Christendom. One more step is thus made to execute the Testament of Peter the Great, and to secure, to what is intellectually the least cultivated and politically the least advanced of the great European races, the initiative in the continent's politics. The diplomatic discussion of the situation among the Great Powers seems to be degenerating into a vigorous scolding-match between |