LITERARY NOTICES. 



273 



war not only left her in entire intellectu- 

 al, moral, and material poverty, but it com- 

 pletely broke the thread of her history, and 

 threw her back full two hundred years. It 

 was not until 1760 that she began " to react 

 against the too absolute thought of France, 

 and to begin the work of restoration on a 

 sounder basis than that which Spain had 

 tried to lay two centuries before." Her res- 

 toration was due to two things the Prus- 

 sian state and the Protestant religion. The 

 one has gradually molded out of an heteroge- 

 neous mass of petty principalities a powerful 

 state, and the other awakened thought, and 

 furnished the conditions in which free in- 

 quiry could thrive. The impulse to a large 

 intellectual life came from without, but, once 

 given, a literature grew up which has ex- 

 panded into a rich and varied product. It 

 has now become national in its tone and 

 feeling, but at first it was purely individ- 

 ual. It is the peculiarity of German liter- 

 ature that it arose, not, as in other coun- 

 tries, after a coherent state had been formed, 

 but before, while yet the nation did not ex- 

 ist, and Germany was but a collection of 

 petty states. It had the task not only of 

 responding to a national spirit, but of form- 

 ing that spirit. At first, as Germany began 

 to recover from the prostration of its pro- 

 tracted war, the literature was but a soulless 

 copy of foreign models, but with time it 

 grew to be more and more national, and un- 

 der the impulse of the Seven Years' war it 

 took definite form, and prepared the ground 

 for the generations of great writers which 

 have finally placed Germany abreast of the 

 other foremost nations of Europe. The three 

 generations of writers who did the great lit- 

 erary work of Germany were those born in 

 the sixty-five years from 1715 to 1780, and 

 which followed each other at periods of 

 twenty years. In the first were Klopstock, 

 Wieland, Winckelmann, Kant, Mendelssohn, 

 and Lessing ; the second included Herder, 

 Voss, Klinger, Burger, Goethe, and Schiller. 

 The third and final generation gave to Ger- 

 many the two Schlegels and the two Ilum- 

 boldts, Rahel, Tieck, Schleiermacher, Nie- 

 buhr, Savignj', and Schelling. The "two 

 schools," says Professor Ilillebrand, " which 

 from 1825 to 1850 influenced the German 

 mind most powerfully, the school of Hegel 

 and that of Gervinus, only continued, devel- 



VOL. XVIII. 18 



oped, summed up, applied, or contradicted 

 the main ideas of the three preceding great 

 generations." The period of the first two 

 generations was the creative one, when Les- 

 sing and Kant, Herder and Goethe and 

 Schiller were leading German thought into 

 new channels. The later period that of 

 the Romanticists was essentially a reaction- 

 ary one, a period in which the middle ages 

 became the ideal. It was, however, a neces- 

 sary one, and under its influence the past 

 of Germany was brought into prominence, 

 and this prepared the later generation for 

 the constructive work of organizing the Ger- 

 man state and arousing the feeling of pa- 

 triotism essential to its success. When this 

 task has been fully accomplished, Germany 

 can again take up the work of intellectual 

 progress and occupy hor place in the gen- 

 eral movement of European thought. Pro- 

 fessor Ilillebrand writes in a very agreeable 

 style, and, though he is confined to a brief 

 outline, he invests his subject with an in- 

 terest that is sustained to the end. 



The Elementary Principles of Scientific 

 Agriculture. By N. T. Lupton, LL. 

 D., Professor of Chemistry in Vander- 

 bilt University. New York : D. Apple- 

 ton & Co. Pp. 107. Price, 50 cents. 



This little primer of agriculture for the 

 public schools had the following origin : The 

 Legislature of Tennessee passed a law au- 

 thorizing the Superintendent of Public In- 

 struction and the Commissioner of Agricul- 

 ture to procure the preparation of a suitable 

 elementary work on agricultural science, to 

 be used in the common schools of that 

 State. The Commissioner selected Dr. N. T. 

 Lupton, Professor of Chemistry in the Van- 

 derbilt University, to prepare the book, and 

 this little volume is the result. As our pub- 

 lic schools are constituted, it is perhaps as 

 good an introductory book as could be got 

 upon the sul)jcct. It is written in a clear 

 and easy style, with the smallest possible 

 amount of technical scientific talk that is 

 consistent with a rudimentary exposition of 

 agricultural principles. After some appro- 

 priate opening remarks on the development 

 of scientific agriculture, the author takes up 

 the origin, composition, and classification of 

 soils, the composition of plants, the compo- 

 sition and properties of the atmosphere, and 



