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134 upon all who were under his command." He was not a martinet or a rigid disciplinarian, but exacted implicit obedience from his subordinates and a prompt and energetic performance of duty. He also recognized the reciprocal relations that should exist between a commander and his troops. Great stress has been laid by some writers upon his "dash," but no estimate of his character could be more erroneous than that which made him only a hard-riding, hard-fighting, and reckless soldier, whose fame and success were due to desperate personal courage and impulsive combativeness, with exceptional good fortune. He had energy and dash, and, added to these, judgment, patience, industry, and full knowledge of all the duties of a commander and a soldier, and deserved all the distinction he won.

The Annual Report of the New York State Board of Charities for 1894, a bulky volume of 576 pages, is a valuable compilation of statistics relating to the charitable institutions and other charities of the State. The total expenditure of the State charities department for the year ending September 30, 1894, was $3,877,709.80; of county and city institutions, $3,872,985.50; and of private and incorporated societies and associations, $13,231,698.52. This was a total increase over 1893 of $574,410.88.

The Teacher's Mentor (Bardeen, 50 cents) is written to aid the inexperience and guide the uncertainty regarding practical details of the beginner who is without special training. It is, the author says, based on what he now sees would have been useful to him in his early years of teaching. Among the topics considered are, the outfit for teaching, including knowledge of subjects to be taught and general information desirable; necessity for understanding the children; what education is; relations between teacher and trustee; desirability of producing a good first impression on the children; and school routine in detail.

The studies on which Le Pétrole, l'Asphalte, et le Bitumen (Petroleum, Asphalt, and Bitumen), of the late Prof. A. Jaggard, of Neufchâtel, is based, were begun in the Jura and the asphalt bed of the Val-de Travers, and were stimulated by the discovery of mineral oil in the United States. Their purpose was to investigate the origin of the natural hydrocarbons. The various theories of petroleum are criticised, the mode of its formation is discussed, the discoveries of beds of it in the Old and New Worlds are described; and bitumen and asphalt are similarly treated. The author concludes that no extraordinary processes or forces are needed to account for the production of these substances, but that it is still going on in the usual course of events, by a kind of natural, slow distillation of organic matter. But in studying the beds it is necessary to discriminate between the original formation of the substances and the displacements which they may have undergone afterward, and which may have had much to do in bringing them into their present position. The book is published by Félix Alcan, Paris, as a number of the French International Scientific Series.

In a similar line, though the startingpoint is different, is Les Merveilles de la Flore Primitive (Wonders of the Primitive Flora) of M. A. Froment, which is published by Georg & Co., at Geneva and at Paris. It begins with a minute study of the carboniferous vegetation, its structure and forms, and proceeds to the discussion of the way in which the coal-forming plants may have been accumulated and converted into coal. This is done by gradual, unheated distillation, which, under certain other conditions, produces the hydrocarbons. A preponderant function is ascribed to electricity in the production of the coal plants. This well-reasoned essay is followed by a remarkable speculation over what may have happened if Australia fell upon the earth as a meteoric mass.

In obedience to an act of Congress, the Commissioner of Labor has made an investigation and a report on The Slums of Baltimore, Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia. The report embraces thirty-three tables, in which are given under various classifications the color or race, country of birth, citizenship, illiteracy, occupations, weekly earnings, number of children, bodily condition, etc., of the inhabitants of the districts examined, also the school attendance of their children, the number of families to a tenement, air space to a person, rent paid, and sanitary condition of the tenements. From an analysis of the tables it appears that the slums, as compared with other parts of the cities in which they are, have a larger proportion of