Reviews 393 
Familiar Lectures on Scientific Subjects. London: Strahan, 
Ludgate hill. 
WE know no book more calculated to do good in its sphere 
than this. We have heard of a charming little book called 
“Philosophy in Sport made Science in Earnest.” It had 
for its aim the simplification of everything abstruse. Sir 
J. F. W. Herschel has done more in the pages before us to 
simplify science, and place it within the reach of popular 
readers, and before minds who can grasp an idea if put 
before them in a plain and simple manner. We know no 
work which will make its way in the schoolroom or in pri- 
vate tuition preferable to this. 
ee ee 
Goethe's Minor Poems. Translated by Edward Chawner, 
late Captain 77th Regiment. London: F. Pitman, Pater- 
noster Row. 
THE translator has undertaken a very arduous task, and 
although the poems of Goethe lose greatly in being clothed 
in an English dress, of the contents of the volume before 
us we can say with confidence that they are but clothed in 
an English dress, and are not, as is too often the case, in 
translations, disguised. The work is admirably got up, in 
Mr. Pitman’s best style. 
The Argosy. London: Strahan. 
THIS gay little bark continues to ride manfully the billows 
of public opinion, and is freighted with a cargo of really 
sterling matter, both grave and gay. “Larry Geoghegan, 
or a Drive with a Dublin Carman,” is perhaps one of the 
raciest sketches we ever read. An Irish carman is always 
a mirth-provoking rascal, but the one in question intensely 
so. It appears he had been formerly intended for the 
priesthood, but somehow or other, as Flaccus reports of 
Cato— 
““ Narratus et prisci Catonis 
Sepe mero caluisse virtus.” 
which our Jehu considers admirably translated by— 
“Of Cato, the straightlaced ‘tis commonly said, 
His Cinsorship rarely went sober to bed.” 
The long and short of it was, that Bacchus was too 
potent a friend for Larry, and he leaves college, a sfozlt 
