The Romance of Astronomy. By R. Kalley Miller. (Macmillan.)— We
always welcome books, written by men so competent as Mr. Miller, on a subject of inexhaustible interest. Mr. Proctor and Mr. Lockyer keep us well supplied with capital reading, but still there is plenty of room for others. In the chapter on "The Planets," for instance, Mr. Miller draws out with much amusing illustration the consequences which must follow from the varying size of those bodies. In Ceres, which has a diameter of HO miles, a baby might play with a rattle as heavy as a moderate-sized cannon-ball, an ordinary jumper could leap over a house, a marksman put a rifle-bullet into a target at twenty miles' distance, and a city be cannonaded, except so far as the planet's shape would interfere, from one end of the world to the other. A race-horse, again, would be able to gallop five thousand miles an hour ! In the chapter on "The Moon," again, there is a very interesting argument on the hypothesis that the air and water which that body seems to want are really to be found on the side which is invisible to us. There are many readers to whom the book will be still further recommended by the profound religious feeling with which Mr. Miller writes.
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