ILLUSTRATED BOORS.
CHARLES El' NGSLEY'S delightful fantasy The Water Babies— one of the very best books ever written for children—has been reprinted in a handsome quarto (Hodder and Stoughton, 20s. net) with many attractive coloured pictures and black-andwhite sketches by Miss Jessie Wilcox Smith. The artist would, we think, have done better to emphasize the natural history in the book rather than the dreams, for children like precise representations of the creatures which Kingsley describes so well. Still, the pictures are very pretty.—Mr. E. J. Detmold's faithful and attractive studies of animals, recalling by turns tirtists as far removed from one another as Pisanello and Hokusai rind the old Dutch flower-painters, have a great charm for children as well as for their elders. Messrs. Dent send us three excellent coloured reproductions of new works by Mr. Detmold, "Hedgehogs," "Nightingale," and " Green Woodpecker," which are all that a young naturalist could desire. They form part of a series of twenty-four plates called The Detinold Nature Pictures (£5 5e. net). We should like to see such pictures in every elementary school.
A History of France, by H. E. Marshall (Hodder and Stoughton, 12s. net), with coloured pictures by A. C. Michael, is designed for the use of children, and should fulfil its purpose. The author begins with the Gauls, and continues the romantic story in a pleasant and readable fashion, devoting a chapter apiece to the Kings from Charles Martel and Pepin onwards. The -Lica ends with the establishment of the Third Republic. Surely a brief account of the war and of ihe recovery of Alsace and Lorraine might give been added to complete the epic of France.
Sir Harry Johnston's Pioneers in India. (Blackie, 3s. 6d. net), with illustrations, is an excellent popular account of European visite to India from the sixteenth century, and of the British conquest, with preliminary chapters on the early invaders of India. It should inspire young readers with a desire to know more about Indian history—a fascinating subject that is sadly neglected in our schools.
In The Romance of Modern Commerce (Seeley, Service, 6s. net) Mr. H. Osman Newland has hit on a good subject, and he has taken pains to make it interesting to young people. He devotes separate chapters to tea, coffee, sugar, rubber, wool, furs, and so on, giving their history and a short account of how these wares are brought to market.—All About Treasures of the Earth, by Frederick A. Talbot (Cassell, 7s. 6d. net), is a more advanced book on mining of all kinds. The author deali not only with coal, iron, salt, gold, and silver, but also with the rarer minerals, and he does not forget asbestos or amber. It is an instructive book, with some good photographs.—Cheinistry and its Mysteries, by Charles R. Gibson (Seeley, Service, 4s. fid. net), is written in a homely style for children and is well illustrated. Mr. Gibson succeeds, we think, in making elementary chemical principles intelligible.
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