Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 1.djvu/263

1857.] modified by the subjective impressions of eyewitnesses to the past; it is rather a novel or romance in the form of mémoires, ridiculing the predominant bourgeoisie of the Old World, and sketching the whole life of a bourgeois, from infancy to green old age. For readers, who, through travel in Europe and acquaintance with French literature and tastes, are enabled to understand the many nice allusions contained in this novel, it is a very entertaining book.

is certainly a remarkable sign of the times, that a book treating of purely scientific matters,—physiological facts and ideas,—like the first of these, of which the second is the complement, should in a very few years have attained to its fourth edition in Germany. All those works on Natural Science, by Alexander von Humboldt, Oersted, Du Bois-Raymond, Cotta, Vogt, Moleschott, Büchner, Rossmässler, Ule, Müller, and others, which have appeared since the Revolution of 1848, uniting a more popular and intelligible style with a purely scientific treatment of the matter-of-fact, irrespective of the religious and political dogmas that conflict with the results of natural science, have met with decided success in Germany and France. They are extensively read and appreciated, even by the less educated and learned classes. Among these works, that of Büchner ranks high, and it is therefore strange that we have seen it hitherto reviewed in no American journal. This may serve us as an excuse for noticing this fourth edition, though it is little improved over the former ones. It exhibits the last results of the science of physiology, in a scientific, but rather popular method of exposition. There is quite a hive of new ideas and intuitions contained in it,—ideas conflicting, it is true, with many received dogmas, and irreconcilable with orthodoxy; but it is of no use to shut our eyes to these ideas, as though the danger threatening from this side could be averted by imitating the policy of the ostrich. They should be faced and examined; the danger is far greater from ignoring them. It is impossible that ideas, largely entertained and cultivated by a nation so expert in thinking, so versed in science and literature as the Germans, should have no interest for the great, intelligent American public. Natural Science may be said to form, at present, an integral portion of the religion of the Germans. It is, at least, a matter of ethnological and historical interest to learn in what regions of thought and speculation our German contemporaries are at home, and wherein they find their mental happiness and delight.

volumes of this interesting work are coming out at the same time,—one containing the second of the five parts into which the prose anthology is divided, with comical and humorous pieces from the sixteenth century, (for instance, extracts from "Fortunatus," the "Historia" of Dr. J. Faust, "Die Schildbürger," Desid, Erasmus's "Gespräche," etc.,)—the other containing a collection of poetry of the same kind, belonging to the present century, and forming part of the third volume, with pieces by Uhland, Eichendorff, Rückert, Sapphir, Wm. Müller, Immermann, Palten, Hoffmann, Kopisch, Heine, Lenau, Möricke, Grün, Wackernagel, and many others. The anthology is accompanied with biographical and historical notes, and explanations of provincialisms and such words as to the American reader of German would be likely to be otherwise unintelligible; so that he may thus, without too much trouble, satisfactorily enjoy this treasury of entertainment. The Germans may well be proud of such literary riches, in which England alone surpasses them.

is one of the numerous imitations of the celebrated "Dorfgeschichten," by Berthold Auerbach. The latter introduced, in a time of literary poverty, a wide range of new subjects for epical treatment,—the life of German peasants, with their simple, healthy, vigorous natures undepraved by a spurious