Smoot Booxe.—The series of History Primers edited by Mr. T.
R. Green (Macmillan) promises to be a very useful one. We have before us at this moment two, The History of Rome, by the Rev. M. Creighton, and The History of Greece, by C. A. Fyffe. We have had especial opportunity of estimating the latter. The style will probably appear at first sight too laboriously easy, but we are convinced that few teachers ever quite fathom the ignorance of boys, or are aware how little of the ordinary literary English is comprehensible to them. The earlier chapters of Mr. Fyffe's book are peculiarly excellent. The early political growth of Athens, to take an instance, is explained with a lucidity which leaves nothing to be desired. That old crux, the "Constitution of Cleisthenes," for instance, is made perfectly plain. The necessary brevity is, of course, a great trial. It is hard, for instance, not to be told about the fate of Demosthenes.— A capital little book for beginners in Greek is Introductory Lessons in Greek Composition, by Bloomfield Jackson. The lessons on the sequences of tenses and moods, on the ways of expressing suppositions and consequences, are specially clear and useful. - Useful, too, are things which might seem at first a little beyond the range of the book. Every teacher, for instance, will be glad to get a lucid statement of -Grimm's law for the change of sounds in the various Aryan languages. If we question any part of the arrangement of the book, it is the rate at which the scholar is supposed to proceed. To begin with declining zen,ely, and to end with a connected paragraph of English to be turned into Greek, argues a very rapid advance in the scholar.— The same criticism may be passed with more force on Latin Prose for Junior Classes through the English Language. By G. S. Steward. We do not exactly see for what rank of scholars this little book is intended, but to begin in Exercise 1 with "I heard a voice" presupposes a good deal of knowledge, which ought to be stated, in the learner, while it is a con- eiderable leap from this to the impersonal construction of verbs that govern a dative in Exercise 3. That the book might, with plenty of explanation, be useful to intelligent scholars, we do not doubt, but we should not like to work an average form with it.—Latine. Reddenda, 'by C. S. Jerram (Longmans), will very well serve the purpose for which it seems to be intended, of supplying teachers with a variety of exercises. New exercises, intelligently constructed, are always useful, if only to .countermine the incessant construction of cribs by the schoolboy or his too mercenary or foolish friends.—Mr. White gives, in his series of Grammar-School Texts," Selections from Ovid's Fusti and Epistles. (Longmans.) The text occupies twenty-five pages ; the vocabulary more than ono hundred and twenty-five. Mr. White's vocabularies are good—much better, we may remark in passing, than his notes—but this seems a cumbrous way of editing. Still the price is very low. If a form gets Latin work for a half-year at the cost of a shilling, 'parents have no reason to complain. As to the comparative merits of vocabulary and dictionary, it is not an easy question to decide, and we must decline, or anyhow, postpone it.-3.1r. John Robson's First Greek Book (Stanford) has reached a third edition.—The series of "Campaigns of Napoleon " is continued in The Campaign of Jena, by Edward E. Bowen. (Rivingtons.) This is an admirable book for the study of a class well advanced in French, and tolerably intelligent. —English History Analysed, by A. S. Cautley (Longmans). We Abell not be wrong in calling this a " cram-book ;" it seems carefully constructed.—We have also to mention The Elements of Euclid, adapted to modern methods in geometry, by James Bryce and David Munn. (Collins.)
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