LITERARY NOTICES. 



411 



tunately, their other engagements, 

 whether of business, pleasure, or re- 

 ligion, are too pressing to permit 

 them to do so, there is much reason 

 to fear that the poison generateil by 

 corrupt politics will seriously affect 

 the whole life and growth of the 

 community. 



LITERARY NOTICES 



A Manual for the Study of Insects. By 

 John Henry and Anna Botsford Com- 

 stock. Ithaca, N. Y. : Comstock Pub- 

 lishing Co. Pp. *701. Price, postpaid, 

 $4.09. 



A substantial service has been done to 

 teachers and students of entomology in the 

 preparation of this handsome, systematically 

 arranged work by Prof, and Mrs. Comstock. 

 Besides describing the important insects of 

 each order, the authors have undertaken 

 to provide an analytical key of insect spe- 

 cies similar to those which the student of 

 plants finds so helpful and interesting. But 

 while much pains has been taken to ren- 

 der easy the classification of specimens, 

 the mere determination of their names has 

 been treated as a matter of slight im- 

 portance. The authors warn the reader 

 against expecting in this volume such an 

 approach to completeness as exists in the 

 manuals of flowering plants. A work con- 

 taining adequate descriptions of all the spe- 

 cies in our insect fauna, they say, " would 

 rival in size one of the larger encyclopae- 

 dias." The general mode of treatment con- 

 sists of a discussion of the characteristics of 

 each order and the families composing it, 

 with descriptions of the commoner species 

 as illustrations of the several families. Sim- 

 plicity has been studied in the descriptions, 

 though not at the expense of accuracy, 

 morphological terms have been reduced to a 

 minimum, and so far as possible a uniform 

 nomenclature has been used for all orders of 

 insects. Writers confining themselves to 

 single orders have developed differing no- 

 menclatures, which is confusing to the stu- 

 dent in passing from one order to another. 

 Prof. Comstock has made as near an ap- 

 proach as practicable to uniformity in this 

 respect, as a consequence of which, homolo- 



gies heretofore above the grasp of any but 

 advanced students, as in the wing- veins, arc 

 now brought forcibly to the attention of the 

 beginner. The technical terms from Greek 

 and Latin, which are a great bugbear to 

 many beginners in the study of science, have 

 been robbed of half their terrors by marking 

 the syllabic division and the accent of each 

 the first time it occurs. Most of the eight 

 hundred woodcuts in the volume have been 

 engraved from Nature by Mrs. Comstock, 

 who has also furnished a part of the text. 

 An attractive frontispiece in colors represents 

 several butterflies and other insects about 

 a thistle-head and a spray of golden-rod. 

 The book is issued at a low price consider- 

 ing its size, its large number of illustrations, 

 and the excellence of its manufacture. 



The Education of the Greek People and 

 its Influence on Civilization. By 

 Thomas Davidson. International Educa- 

 tion Series, Vol. XXVIII. New York : 

 D. Appleton & Co. Pp. 229. Price, 

 $1.50. 



The purpose of the author in this vol- 

 ume is " to show how the Greek people were 

 gradually educated up to that stage of cul- 

 ture which made them the teachers of the 

 whole world, and what the effect of that 

 teaching has been." After an introductory 

 chapter on the aim and general form proper 

 to education, he outlines the life of the 

 Greeks and its ideals. He traces the Greek 

 citizenship from its patriarchal and tribal 

 origins, and finds worth " the worth of the 

 individual as a member of society " to be 

 the Greek ideal in life. To this conception 

 was added, when leisure came, the ability to 

 employ that leisure in elevating avocations 

 (diagoge). The nature of education, both 

 before and after the rise of philosophy, is 

 then sketched. In the earlier times much 

 attention was given to physical culture, and 

 for young boys music had almost equal 

 prominence. Competitive exercises evidently 

 were not feared. The mother-tongue and its 

 literature were thoroughly studied, but we 

 find no mention of any time whatever being 

 devoted to the grammars of other languages, 

 dead or living. Youths learned political 

 science by observation of the conduct of 

 public affairs by their elders. After the 

 philosophical era began individual happiness 

 came to rival civic worth as an end of activ- 



