The Gist of Japan, the Islands, their People and Missions.
By the Rev. R. B. Peery, A.M., Ph.D., of the Lutheran Mission, Saga, Japan. With Illustrations. (Oliphant, Anderson, and Ferrier.) —It is difficult for a book about Japan to be dull, but we must confess that Dr. Peery's well-meant work on the subject very nearly succeeds in this respect. He would have done better to have confined himself to his account of missionary work, for the first half of the book, which contains general impressions of the islands and a very sketchy history of their people, hardly rises above the level of the ordinary tourist's manual. And the good missionary proses abominably. "A study of the manners and customs of foreign peoples is both interesting and profit-
able To know the manners and customs of a country is to know much about that country. There is no truer index of the character of a people's life,"—these discoveries have been antici- pated in the pages of "Sandford and Merton." Even when he is sticking to hie own last, the writer wastes so much space on the obvious and trivial that he leaves out nearly all that one would wish to know about missionary work in Japan. "The greatest
hardship the missionary has to bear is his loneliness and isolation. Separated almost entirely from his own race, he is deprived of all those social joys that are so dear to him." A layman at home could almost have guessed as much. And it is really comic to find that "many sermons have been preached in Japan in negligee shirts and knickerbockers,"—one wonders dimly of what, since the sermons were thus attired, the costume of the preacher consisted. The style is pronouncedly American, and we are told, e g., that "St. Paul was an itinerating missionary on a large scale." The book is adorned with the indistinctly reproduced photographs that seem to be inseparable from a work on Japan.
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