LITERARY NOTICES. 



4i5 



the Jataka tales, a great many fables of ster- 

 ling significance, which, from their point and 

 brevity, can be borne as easily as proverbs in 

 the memory. Advancing to pupils of riper 

 years, our author shows what can be done in 

 adapting the Iliad, the Odyssey, and other 

 great classics to the education of admira- 

 tion, to the discrimination between motives 

 worthy and unworthy, to the building up of 

 lofty ideals of life. That conduct may be 

 the better practiced as an art, we are next 

 given an outline of morals as a science ; the 

 duties which relate to the physical life and 

 the feelings are described and enforced; 

 then, filial and fraternal duties receive atten- 

 tion ; third, come the duties to all men of 

 justice and charity ; and, lastly, a word re- 

 garding the duties of citizenship. 



Prof. Adler gives us this book as an out- 

 come of fifteen years' successful work in the 

 class-room, and he intends it to be simply an 

 aid, not a guide, to the teacher. While the 

 founder and leader of the ethical movement, 

 and on fire with the ethical spirit, he is too 

 wise a man not to see the folly of being 

 righteous overmuch. He warns the teacher 

 against that moral microscopy which absorbs 

 itself in trifles, only to find strength lacking 

 when a genuine battle has to be fought. But 

 even strength is not everything. It is, after 

 all, at surfaces mainly that we touch, and so 

 we have emphasis laid on grace, on fine man- 

 ners, as the true efflorescence of high charac- 

 ter, enabling it to win where mere strength 

 would fail. He would not have the aim of 

 the moral teacher too much in evidence, well 

 knowing that it is because the marksman 

 does not point at the bull's-eye that he hits it. 

 While a disciple of Kant and an upholder of 

 a moral law underived from the reckoning of 

 consequences, he is willing to give due credit 

 to the utilitarians. Duty goes further and 

 higher than prudence, yet for along distance 

 they are companions ; righteousness does not 

 work for wages, but why blink the fact that 

 it receives goodly rewards? But, however 

 much character in the making may be aided 

 by prudential considerations, character in its 

 perfection has left them far behind. Duty, 

 at first a matter of conscious purpose, be- 

 comes confirmed as the habit of the soul, 

 and flowers at last as impulses from which 

 all sense of effort or calculation of gain has 

 passed away. 



On every page this book shows that it 

 comes from a strong, judicious, and richly 

 freighted mind. It demonstrates how the 

 culture of conscience, supplementing and 

 completing the culture of the intellect, can 

 lift education to a plane where it shall ad- 

 dress itself not to part of human nature but 

 the whole. Its chapters have been written 

 for the teacher ; they contain counsels that 

 every parent in the land would be the better 

 for laying to heart. 



The Electric Railway in Theory and 

 Practice. By Oscar T. Crosby and 

 Louis Bell. New York. The W. J. 

 Johnston Companv (limited), 1892. Pp. 

 400. Price, $2.50. 



Among the industrial applications of elec- 

 tricity none have attained greater commercial 

 importance in recent years than electric trac- 

 tion. Although experimental work in this 

 field had been carried on both here and 

 abroad for many years, it was not until the 

 great electric revival of a dozen years ago 

 that the subject began to have importance. 

 Even then this form of traction did not take 

 a commercial place comparable with the 

 other applications of electricity. Much de- 

 tail work had to be done before it could 

 enter upon the industrial stage, and its 

 economy and adaptability to actual service 

 had to be demonstrated by the test of time. 

 Up to about six years ago electric railways 

 may be said to have progressed no further 

 than the experimental stage, but since that 

 time the application of electric traction to 

 street-car service has gone on at an unex- 

 ampled rate in this country, until now a 

 large number of the cities and towns have 

 one or more electric railways. As is usual 

 in the practical development of a new art, 

 many fruitless experiments had to be made 

 and much money and time wasted. It was 

 early recognized that the method of opera- 

 tion which promised the largest measure 

 of success was that in which the current 

 was conveyed to the moving car by means of 

 a circuit carried along the line, and connec- 

 tion with which was made by some sort of 

 elastic contact carried by the car. But it 

 was not demonstrated until after many trials 

 in just what manner this could be done to 

 provide a reliable and economical service. 

 Attempts were made to use the rails as the 



