Indian barbarities and studies of cruel suffering from cold are the staple of the seven tales in Mr. Jack London's "Lost Face," but their craftsmanship is good. "Lost Face" illustrates Mr. London's idea of humor, the point lying in beheading a man, but horrible as it is it is well written and is even made credible, and the same might be said of "The Wit of Porportuk." Mr. London is no sentimentalist as to the Indian, but he has no prejudice against him.

There is no exaggeration in his descriptions, but they repel and sometimes disgust, as they must if truthful. Consequently he who objects to being disgusted should read something less true to life. The Macmillan Company.

E. P. Dutton & Co. are the American publishers of a complete edition of "The Works of Sir John Suckling," including his poems, plays and letters and his singular discourse upon "Religion by Reason." The editor, Mr. A. Hamilton Thompson, has been at the pains to compare the original editions of 1646, 1648 and 1658; and he furnishes an introduction briefly but adequately describing and characterizing Suckling's literary and political career, and adds some extremely serviceable and illuminating notes. Altogether this is likely to remain the definitive edition of Suckling's works. Not the least of its attractions is that it is not too pretentious and not too cumbrous for easy reading.

Dr. George M. Gould of Ithaca, New York, who has done more than any other writer or specialist to expound and illustrate the theory that eyestrain is the source of a large proportion of the pains and ailments of mankind, publishes through P. Blakiston's

Son & Co. a sixth and final volume of "Biographic Clinics" devoted to this subject, and containing numerous fresh illustrations of the truth of the author's theory. Jonathan Swift is the first example cited: all the others are contemporary. Dr. Gould has made extended and practical observations in this field; he writes with a clearness and pungency which make his books easy reading even to the unprofessional; and he has devoted time and labor for years to this propaganda with an unselfishness and energy which are truly admirable.

"The Religions of Eastern Asia," by the Rev. Dr. Horace Grant Underwood, is composed of the lectures delivered last year before New York University on the Charles F. Deems foundation, and they treat not only of Korea, the author's chosen field, but also of China and Japan, and include discourses on Taoism, Shintoism, Shamanism, Confucianism and Buddhism, and a final lecture summarizing the others, and comparing the beliefs described with the religion of the Old and New Testaments. Works on each of the three countries are many, but few originally written in English define and describe the religions of all three, and the final chapter of comparison for the sake of which all the others were written, is such a paper as many a puzzled layman has desired while contemplating the plausibilities of those who would persuade him that Christianity is borrowed from inferior faiths and originated almost anywhere but in Bethlehem.

Dr. Underwood, having tested the religions of Eastern Asia both by their creeds and by their works, can and does supply such an inquirer with answers to many questions. Further, his

statements in regard to Japanese morality are highly important. Dr. Underwood hastened back to Korea as soon as his course of lectures was completed, leaving his book to be seen through the press and indexed by Mr. George W. Gilmore, but he left the New York University and his country the richer for a valuable work. The Macmillan Company.

The groundwork of Mr. Clarence E. Mulford's "Hopalong Cassidy" is a struggle between cattlemen and cattle thieves and upon it is embroidered a love affair conducted chiefly on horseback and in the presence of great herds and not a few cowboys. The assassinations, effected and attempted, the prolonged and savage fights, the perfect lawlessness prevailing are represented as occurring in and near one of the worst towns of the semi-arid southwest, and are not exaggerated beyond actuality, although sometimes nothing less than horrible. But the author is careful to warn the reader against supposing them invariable, and such virtue as the state of society permits is large in proportion to the viciousness. As a means of amusement the tale is adapted to the masculine taste rather than to the feminine, for the heroine is a diamond in the rough, and the author's phraseology belongs to the ranch. The book reached its second edition before the first was published, which shows what the booksellers expected from a story by the author of "Bar 20." A. C. McClurg & Co.

Mr. John R. Spears's "The Story of the American Merchant Marine" appears more than seven years after the publication of Mr. Winthrop Lippit Marvin's "The American Merchant Marine" with its final declaration that "the same indomitable spirit which wrought our railway system

and is now driving the surplus output of our industries into all the markets of the world, can win supremacy for the United States, just as soon as it learns that it is worth while to make the endeavor." The endeavor has not yet been made, and Mr. Spears's book closes with "We shall never again see the Stars and Stripes triumphant upon the high seas until the American environment evolves once more, by natural process, the nautical unit as efficient for the modern day as was our ship of the sail in the days long past;" and his remarks on an American fleet with its colliers under foreign flags and American behavior in the matter of adopting the turbine, and American need of swift steamers in Asiatic waters are sufficient evidence that he sees small chance that such evolution will be encouraged. But although the book ends despondently, Mr. Spears takes pleasure in the gallant chronicle of the early days, and writes of it with his customary clearness and appreciation for the picturesque, and if the closing chapters be mortifying to American pride, it is because they could not be otherwise and be truthful. The real history of the merchant marine, the chapters dealing with the period when such an entity really existed should arouse the younger readers to the determination to discover what is that serviceable unit for which American trade waits and watches. The book is written for adults but it will delight any manly boy and will train him to take his part in the struggle for new ships when the struggle comes. The Macmillan Company.

The most hopeful symptom of the present feverish agitation for the abolition of consumption is that its advocates do not pretend that it costs nothing; indeed, the investment required is so considerable that a patient has a right to complain if no good result en

sue. "The Conquest of Consumption," Dr. Wood Hutchinson's little book, must be called sensible rather than agreeable, for its author belongs to that class of practitioners in which assured knowledge obscures and sometimes seems to banish tact, and he so insists upon the correctness of his system of treatment that a patient with au ounce of perversity in his nature would be tempted to break all his rules, and risk the consequences. This defect will not of course influence a sensible man, but sensible men are as rare as the Christians known to Davie Deans. The fresh air element in the cure of consumption has been so widely advertised that its features are well known, and both in the suburbs and in the "real country" one's wanderings are punctuated by visions of sleeping arrangements presupposing utopian courtesy and lack of observation in the neighbors of their owner; but the scale of diet supposed to be curative has not been so frequently published. Briefly, it amounts to taking at least three times the amount of food commonly absorbed and to using the most expensive articles. Five dozen eggs a week is a specimen item. Yet, be it repeated, the very costliness of the cure recommended is good evidence of the sincerity of its advocates, and also of its value, and Dr. Hutchinson's book should be attentively scanned by those interested in consumption, and, as the author is careful to insist, as long as one case of consumption remains the entire human race is interested. Houghton Mifflin Co.

"Let me write their novels," might be the wish of Fletcher of Saltoun were he writing of the United States in this age, when, between ragtime and "Salome," a song has no more influence than a defeated politician. Since "A Fool's Errand" showed the sensitiveness of the popular mind to stories

ence.

of political and social affairs in the south, they have abounded and Mr. Warrington Dawson's "The Scar" is the work of a writer belonging to a generation which has matured since Judge Tourgee's time. It takes no account of the feelings of the slave holder, the state-rights man, the secessionist, but concerns itself with gentlefolk striving to sustain life in honest respectability, no matter by what repugnant and arduous toil, and almost oblivious of any earlier state of existAmong them comes a self-centred girl from New York, a willing exile from the city in which she has ignorantly made herself amenable to punishment by financial mismanagement, and the conflict between her nature and the local spirit is the real story. Beside it runs the life of the black population, its individuals so varied that no generalization can include the types between those incarnations of unselfish devotion and of utterly animal indifference to everything not purely physical, and on a plane by itself goes on the life of the ignorant and mercenary white man, the mongrel seeking to build his fortune on the necessity of his betters. This triple current is so skilfully conducted that consciousness of each is steadily maintained, producing a most poignant impression, and yet each individual is sharply distinguished. But nowhere is there a trace of effort to produce an effect. The author's ideal of fiction was evidently shaped before he encountered either the ugliness of "realism" or the amorphous repulsiveness of new art. That he is the son of a Charleston editor, one of the men who shaped the New South, because they loved and cherished the old, partly explains the book; that he has lived in a foreign capital until his vision was cleared of prejudice completes the explanation. "The Scar" is both a good story and an important fragment of history. Small, Maynard & Co.