Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 12.djvu/385

Rh mark the author as a man of reflection and originality.

old and standard book of reference has been revised, brought up to time, and is now reported as in its twenty-first edition. It contains a great amount of information, and, when the method of it is understood, it is conveniently available for use; but it may be observed that if the world's progress had taken place in accordance with the plan of this work, it would have been a somewhat mixed and chaotic affair. The chronological tables conform to the idea of historical progression, but the main body of the book consists of Hayden's "Dictionary of Dates," in which the events of the world are represented, not in the order of time, succession, and causality, but in the alphabetical order, and to this the progress of things has fortunately not conformed.

interest of the Eastern question in England has risen to such a point as greatly to stimulate the demand for works relating to the countries now implicated in war. Sir Edward Creasy has thus been led to revise and republish his history of the Turks, which has been long out of print, and Mr. Holt has done a good service to American literature in adding the book to his valuable series on the Oriental countries. The reputation of its author is a guarantee of its excellence, and in making the book over he seems to have spared no pains in the consultation of all authentic sources of information. Judge Creasy says, in his preface, that the most important historical work on the Turks is by the German Von Hammer, who has dealt with the subject so exhaustively that his history, if translated, would make at least twenty English octavo volumes. He has followed this author closely in the reconstruction of his own work, and he speaks of the German treatise to which he is so much indebted in the following terms:

author of this monograph, while stationed at a military post in Dakota Territory as assistant surgeon, availed himself of the opportunity thus afforded of studying the manners and customs and the language of the neighboring Indian tribe—the Hidatsas or Minnetarees. Among the subjects treated under the head of ethnography are ceremonies, mythology, marriage, relationships, hunting, divisions of time, etc. The philological section is very elaborate, containing a systematic grammar of the language, a pretty full Hidatsa-English dictionary, an English-Hidatsa vocabulary, and a list of local names.

bulletins of the U. S. Geological Survey, issued by Dr. Hayden to facilitate the publication of the work done by the scientific men of his staff, and to place before