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 sparks: The Expansion of the American People S05 a mere table of contents ; this table, however, in its apparent lack of system — for the thread which binds it together, if there be one, is not evident, even to a careful reader, — really typifies the confusion of the whole book. The faint yet pervasive use of metaphor, too, freshly ob- scures meaning. So in the end it is not suprising that one lays down the Transit of Civilization with some misty impressions which very likely Dr. Eggleston never meant to make. To take at random a single one of these, he can hardly have intended to inform readers unlearned in the law that an ordinary method of conveying real property in old New England was unsupported livery of seisin. His researches must have brought him in sight, for example, of such things as the published volumes of Suffolk Deeds, and Thomas Lechford's Note-Book. To take another of these impressions, he can hardly have intended, at a time when state universities still maintain alternative schools of homoeopathic medicine, and educated people flock to seminaries of Christian Science, that we should serenely smile at the medical superstition of three centuries ago, as if all such superstition were dead and gone. And he must know that even to this day a knowledge of Latin proves, no one can tell why, the soundest basis for mental training. And so on. His confusion might seriously mislead. But this is more than enough of fault-finding. Though the Transit of Civilization had deeper faults still, it would remain a book worth read- ing. As a collection of out-of-the-way and curious memoranda, suggest- ing all manner of discursive speculation, it has a quality and a charm which queerly group it in memory with Aubrey's Miscellanies, and Bur- ton's Anatomy, and whatever other treasuries of oddity one may be fond of. It has over these, too, the advantage that its own references to authority may always be trusted and will often prove illuminating. Last and best of all, it really points the way to a kind of American history which in time may flood our past with revivifying light. For we shall never fully know ourselves until some imaginative, sympathetic historian, mature in power and reflection, shall have shown us, in semblance of its old vitality, what was the true mental and moral condition of our emi- grant fathers, in their habit as they lived. Barrett Wendell. Tlic Expansion of the American People, Social and Territorial. By Edwin Erle Sparks, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of American History, The University of Chicago. (Chicago : Scott, Fores- man and Co. 1900. Pp. 461.) Ever since the north temperate coast of the western hemisphere be- gan to be occupied by European settlers, population and civilization have been spreading westward. So important has this westward movement been, and so much more marked than the movement in any other direc- tion, that it is a common-place observation. All that was ever needed to prove its existence was to state the relevant facts clearly ; and it does not