The Great World's Farm. By Selina Gaye. (Seeley and Co.)—
This is a most excellent, readable, and useful work of a kind which the author has now become quite an expert in producing. The title is borrowed from Mr. Henry Drummond's volume on "Tropical Africa," and its character is well described by Professor Boulger in a too didactic preface as "simple enough to be understood by unscientific readers, so accurate as to teach nothing that will afterwards have to be unlearnt, and extremely attractive in selec- tion and marshalling of facts." Essentially, indeed, this is a volume of the natural history and geography type, and of the sort which calls up the name of Miss Arabella Buckley. Nor does it tell against the book that the writer has "culled, without pretence of originality, from many of the most accurate works of travel of modern times, and set before her readers in detail the inferencee to be drawn from the facts which she describes." In such chapters as "Pioneer-Labourers," "Soil-Carriers," "Leaves and their Work," "The Golden Rule for Flowers," and "Nature's Militia," the story of how the "world's farm" is made, carried on, and protected, is exhaustively but not tediously told. If its author has had to depend on others for her facts and her science, she introduces both without anything that savours of effort, as when,. treating of "The Golden Rule for Flowers," she mentions, almost in an off-hand way, how "holly-blossoms are fertilised chiefly by bees and not by wind, pollen having been observed by Mr. Darwin on many pistil-tips which must have been brought from a tree sixty yards away, and could not have been conveyed by the wind, since it was blowing in the wrong direction." Altogether, this is an admirable book to place in the hands of a boy or girl who has a love of Nature, and is emerging from the elementary stage of schooling or self-instruction.
Two useful volumes may be mentioned together, and mentioned
in good time to make their information available. These are The Health Resorts of Europe, by Thomas Linn, M.D., with a Preface by A. S. Sansom, M.D. (H. Kimpton)—(Dr. Li1111 is physician to the bathing establishments of Aix-les-flame and Marlioz) ; and where to go Abroad, edited by A. R. Hope Moncrieif (A. and C. Black),
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