it devotes to the first two letters of the alphabet no less than 1240 pages. Not only is it more bulky and more expensive,—it is also more restricted in its scope, and therefore much more scientific. The Century Dictionary is a popular work in comparison. The purchasers of the latter ought to find some compensation in the circumstance that they may, if in good health, fairly hope to live to see the end of it, and the study of so exquisite a work might well tend to prolong the life of the enthusiastic student of words and things, by giving him something very pleasant to look forward to. But it becomes the subscribers to Dr. Murray's noble work to be less sanguine. Begun some thirty years ago, its first installment appeared in 1884, and its veteran editorin-chief is now heroically struggling through the letter C. The nineteenth century will give place to the twentieth, nay, the language itself may take on an altered complexion, before Dr. Murray can write finis. Meanwhile, let us be thankful to Professor Whitney and his learned assistants for giving us something so much better than Webster as a succedaneum. Perhaps by the time we have learned all the Century Dictionary has to teach us about the English language, Dr. Murray will be ready with his advanced course.

It has often been asserted by linguists that words are also things, but perhaps the relationship has never been so clearly illustrated as in the Century Dictionary. In the Preface to In the Preface to the great Dictionary of the English Philological Society, Dr. Murray takes pains to define the boundary between a dictionary and a cyclopædia :

"We do not look in a Cyclopædia for the explanation and history of anon, perhaps, or busy; we do not expect in an English dictionary information about Book-binding, Photography, the Aniline Dyes, or the Bridgewater Treatises, or mention of Abyssinia, Argynnis, Alopecurus, Adenia, or Blennenteritis."

This boundary is not entirely swept away by the Century Dictionary, but it is largely modified and extended. Taking, for example, the subjects mentioned in the above quotation, information is found, or may be confidently expected, upon all of them except Abyssinia, which is referred to under the heads of its derivatives, Abyssine, Abyssinian, where a concise paragraph may be found concerning the Abyssinian Church. In Dr. Murray's great Dictionary, on the other hand, not only proper nouns, but their derivatives, are excluded, except when they are necessary "to the better explanation of derived words."

Thus African, Algerian, Austrian, Bulgarian, and other derivatives from the corresponding proper nouns are omitted by Dr. Murray, but are included in the Century Dictionary under a great variety of forms. E.g., from the word Africa the Century Dictionary explains the following derivatives: Afric, African, Africander, Africanism, Africanization, Africanize, Afrogaan, illustrating nearly all of them by suitable quotations. Not a single one of these words is included by Dr. Murray.

Little more need be said here as to the encyclopædic scope of the Century Dictionary. As to the value of this feature of the work, there is, happily, room for but one opinion.. Instead of long and exhaustive encyclopædia articles, information is here found scattered under a vast variety of heads, and made accessible by innumerable cross-references. No opportunity is lost to insinuate information; every crevice is fact-crammed; knowledge is sprung upon the unwary reader at every turn; we are enfiladed with learning and ambushed into erudition. The reviewer meets nowadays with few more interesting books, and with many more disconnected ones. Here, at least, is a book which never lures us into speculative bogs with the ignis fatuus of verbiage. The modern critic, who has become accustomed to read through a hundred pages for a single idea, is somewhat dazed to find here a hundred ideas

or the pregnant germs of them— on a single page. At first blush, one is inclined to suspect oneself the victim of some "stocked' mine, or to imagine oneself to be inspecting Spenser's Cave of Mammon :

"The room was large and wide, As it some guild or solemn temple were; Many great golden pillars did upbear The massy roof, and riches huge sustain; And every pillar deckéd was full dear With crowns, and diadems, and titles vain, Which mortal princes wore while they on earth did reign.”

Of course no sensible person would go to a dictionary or to a cyclopædia for systematic knowledge. The futility of the attempt to make a single set of books a repertory of all knowledge is signally illustrated in the "Encyclopædia Britannica," the longer articles of which, being virtually text-books on their several subjects, can be read only by students and people of leisure. The speed of the nimblest runners is taxed to chase the retreating boundary of the kingdom of "Chaos and old Night" in a single direction, while the correspondent extension of the realm of knowledge is going forward with almost equal rapidity at every

frontier. Busy people whose intellectual curiosity is keen, and who aspire to accuracy in their knowing, have long felt the need of a reference-work that should give succinct information, in the most accessible shape, upon the greatest variety of subjects that may be either of general interest or that may be referred to, more or less allusively, in general literature. Precisely such a book is the Century Dictionary. Hitherto the general reader has been obliged to makeshift with Webster, and with the several appendixes, supplements, addenda, and other excrescences which have been superimposed upon, but not embodied in, that useful work. The Century Dictionary saves our time and patience by throwing all its abundant and various information under one alphabet, so that the hurried consulter who has succeeded in running down tweedle-dee is not obliged to take a fresh start in order to run down tweedle-dum.

As Louis Agassiz, when a poor student in lodgings at a high altitude at Paris, was one day staggering homeward under the burden of a formidable encyclopædia, Alexander von Humboldt abruptly accosted him with the inquiry: "What are you doing with that asses' bridge?" Agassiz modestly explained that he felt the need of information about many things which he had no time to study fundamentally. Agassiz was right, especially for his age and for ours. Perhaps Humboldt was the last man who could, like Bacon, successfully take all knowledge to be his province, and even the vast circumference of his mind required the complemental arc of his brother William's in order to make the circle full. At all events, the very Humboldts of our time will probably find it convenient to glance occasionally at the Century Dictionary,—much more the ordinary worker who feels his scope to be distinctly and painfully limited. This Dictionary, aiming to give the meaning and history of all English words with a fulness never before approached (although to be greatly surpassed in Dr. Murray's colossal work), aiming also to group under these words all useful information that can reasonably be looked for in such a place, and actually performing this service for us with an accuracy only to be attained by the laborious exertions of a large corps of specialists, such a work is as far as possible from being an asses' bridge, or a Nuremberg funnel. It may, indeed, help superficial people to become accurate people, but it is not likely to be much consulted by the indolent or the smatterer.

With respect to the majority of subjects, elementary knowledge is all that the most accomplished man can possess; accuracy is the test that distinguishes the scholar from the sciolist, and selection the criterion that distinguishes Bacon's "full man " from "the bookful blockhead." Dr. Whately long ago pointed out, with his accustomed good sense and perspicacity, the radical distinction between the words superficial and rudimentary, which, as applied to knowledge, are so frequently used as synonyms. It is to be hoped that Prof. H. M. Whitney, who treats the subject of Synonymy in this Dictionary with such lucidity and taste, will quote, in its proper place, the passage wherein Dr. Whately makes this judicious distinction.

In conclusion, I will mention three important points in which this Dictionary surpasses all preceding works of the kind, and compares favorably even with special works. The first is the treatment of synonyms, already referred to. Synonyms are not only defined and distinguished in a clear and readable way, but are copiously illustrated by quotations which are, for the most part, well-selected,—though it is hard to see what authority there may be in quotations from Welsh's "English Literature." Secondly, readers of Chaucer and other Middle-English authors will find this Dictionary incomparably fuller and more satisfactory than, say, such a work as MayhewSkeat's "Concise Dictionary," or Halliwell's "Dictionary of Archaisms and Provincialisms." Elizabethan literature is also treated with a fulness of detail that apparently leaves little to be desired. Finally, the etymologies, as might be expected from Professor Whitney, are marvellous in their union of scholarship with clearness and precision of statement. To say that they will fairly bear comparison with the etymologies of Dr. Murray is to give them the highest praise. Dr. Murray is noticeably stronger and fuller on the side of Old English, Professor Whitney on the side of Oriental languages. Perhaps Dr. Murray abounds in greater wealth of detail, and is, on the whole, more suggestive; Professor Whitney, on the other hand, is far completer in his citation of cognate and allied words, English and foreign. I should say, therefore, that, for the study of words in their infinite ramifications and relations and affinities, the Century Dictionary is little inferior to Murray. Sometimes (e. g., in the treatment of the words and and breach) Professor Whitney is considerably fuller than

Dr. Murray; and, in general, the reader who has studied the etymology of a word in either dictionary will find that he has something to learn from the other.

It should be added that Professor Whitney acknowledges his obligations to Dr. Murray, whose work could, however, he says, "be consulted in revising the proofs of A and of part of B only." The curious reader will soon find the place where these obligations cease. It is safe, I think, to say that, could Professor Whitney have seen Dr. Murray's remarks upon the etymologies of the words bread and brotherhood, he would scarcely have derived the latter from brother and hood, and the former from the root of the word brew. Under bread Dr. Murray adduces very interesting facts, which seem to dispose of the conjecture that bread is cognate with brew. It ought to rejoice Prohibition hearts to be assured that the baker and the brewer have no more affinity than have the baker and the candlestick-maker. Professor Whitney may be confidently expected to correct himself under the word loaf, when he reaches it. The obligation of the one lexicographer to the other will, however, in the long run undoubtedly be shifted to the other side, for it is hardly supposable that Dr. Murray's lifelong task should not at many points be lightened by the toil of his honored American fellow-laborer in the vineyard of MELVILLE B. ANDERSON.

words.

THE GEOLOGIC WINTER.*

The most signal recent advances in geological knowledge have taken place at opposite extremes of the chronological scale. The application of polarized light and the microscope to the study of crystalline rocks has opened a revelation to investigators of the most ancient deposits of the earth's crust; and the sagacity of recent students has introduced a flood of light upon the accumulations left by the last great revolution of the earth. The former advance is the outcome of a new application of old principles; the latter has been achieved by the old method of faithful observation in the field. The petrographic results, however, have

not not yet led to much new knowledge touching the earth's emergence from primitive chaos; while the Quaternary studies have added greatly to our knowledge of the steps of our earth's approach toward the modern order. It is a popular presentation of the nature of these steps which the well-trained author has prepared in the present volume.

It may be disputed whether an addition of information concerning the later epochs of geologic history, possesses greater interest than new determinations touching the earlier. The later epochs, being nearer our own times, however, are most likely to yield us what has been so long sought: a common measure for historic and geologic time. So far as studies in Quaternary geology have afforded such measure, they have supplied us with a sounding-line for penetrating the depths of Palæozoic and Archæan time. In proportion, too, as Quaternary studies have been productive of results so striking to the common intelligence, they have increased general interest in the data of surface geology, and have augmented the significance of the simple and familiar phenomena occupying the very exterior of our planet, within constant reach of the most indifferent obser

vation.

Few persons look upon these surface materials with the thoughtful glance which is their privilege. The gravel and stones are here, they say, and that is all there is of it; and they rush on in pursuit of those gilded phantoms so likely to flit from their possession while they live, and so certain to be left behind when they die. But each bowlder, each gravel-bank, each "potash-kettle," each gravel ridge, remains as a vestige of a former time when the Northern States and Canada lay beneath a sheet of glacier ice like that which broods, through the centuries, over the continent of Greenland. Along the southern margin of this vast sheet detrital materials accumulated, like those morainic piles so familiar to-day around the fronts of the living glaciers of Savoy. Through the crevasses in that continental glacier, the streams accumulated by melting on the surface of the ice were precipitated, as on the surface of the great Muir glacier of Alaska, so particularly and fascinatingly described by our author. Along the bottom of that continental glacier, systems of rivers and rivulets coursed, transporting, depositing, and arranging the detritus of the glacier, as modern streams still occupy themselves in making new arrangements of the same detritus. Over

the exposed rock-surfaces, the continental glacier glided, smoothing or scratching and scoring the hard surface, as the Mer de glace, in modern times, has smoothed and scored the rocky walls against which its moving mass has rested. Even the remoteness of these events is hinted by the fact that the glaciers of Shasta and Tacoma and Baker and St. Elias are the visibly diminishing remnants of a sheet once, perhaps, continuous-as Argentière, Des Bossoms, Du Miage and Mer de glace are, in our time, only the upper branches of a trunk glacier which once stretched from Chamounix to Geneva. When we get the measure of the visible rate of retreat over a mile, we have the means of timing the retreat from the glacier's ancient limits.

When we inform the reader that such is the range of facts of which our author gives an exposition, and such the nature of the interpretations which he places on them, it will be understood that we have in this work abundant sources of interest and information. A characteristic of the work, however, is its freshness and originality. It is not a treatise compiled from many other books. He who has been a student of glaciology is as certain to be interested and instructed as he who has till now remained ignorant. The author has been The author has been less a student of books than a personal investigator. He has traced the southern terminus of the continental glacier from Massachusetts over Long Island, to New Jersey, and through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, to Dakota. He has travelled to the Pacific, and followed the line of disappearing glaciers to Alaska; and, camped in front of the stupendous wall of the Muir glacier, he has listened to the thunder of the down-crashing icebergs, he has measured the movements of the ice-field, crossed its crevasses, and mapped the gigantic outspread of the glacier through the ramifying valleys of an eroded Archæan slope. He has brought home pictures of these scenes, and strewn them lavishly over the pages of this luxurious volume.

After explaining, for the benefit of the inexpert reader, what a glacier is, he enters upon notices of the disappearing glaciers of the Pacific coast. He takes us at once to Alaska, and gives us the results of a month's sojourn at the head of Glacier Bay. Passing up Baffin's Bay, he supplies us with glimpses of the great Humboldt glacier of Greenland-the cradle of icebergs. A chapter is devoted to glaciers in

He

other parts of the world. The reader is now educated to detect the signs of a glacier, and our author next points them out over the area of the Northern United States the proofs that the continental glacier was once here. He reasons on the probable depth of the ice in North America. He returns to the "terminal moraine" which winds across the States. suggests the facts bearing on glacial erosion and transportation. He considers the curious phenomena of "drumlins" and "kames." He reminds us of the evidences of glacial dams, lakes, and waterfalls; and traces the connection between glacial lakes and the "loess" of China and the Mississipi valley. As a sequence of the rigorous conditions, the pre-glacial vegetation retreated to southern latitudes, and, on the final retreat of the ice, plants and animals returned to their present stations - following the disappearing ice toward the mountain-tops, as toward the Arctic region.

After this survey of the inductive data supplied by glaciers in their formation, action, and effects, the mind naturally turns to an inquiry in reference to the cause of continental glaciation; and this is the course taken by our author. All the principal theories are explained. When did these great events take place? is the next question considered. We used to be told that they lie two hundred thousand years back in the depths of geologic time; but Professor Wright finds good reason for fixing a much more modern date. It was because man is shown to have lived contemporaneously with the glaciers, that their supposed remoteness attached to the human species an antiquity reaching a hundred thousand years. It was not because such antiquity shocked traditional beliefs, that the epoch of general glaciation was brought down to six or eight thousand years. The more moderate date has been argued by those whose judgments could not be biased by traditional beliefs. It is considerations of this nature which occupy the last chapter of the book.

This full and fascinating account of glaciers, modern and ancient, their causes and effects, is splendidly illustrated by maps and views, mostly prepared for this volume, executed in the best style of photo-engraving, and issued on paper of first quality. We have to pronounce this one of the most successful attempts at authorship, and one of the handsomest books, which the decade has produced.

ALEXANDER WINCHELL.

A HERO OF THE OXFORD MOVEMENT.*

The Tractarian movement of 1834 has given to the world several very striking and amusing volumes. Newman's "Apologia," Mozley's "Reminiscences," Dean Burgon's "Twelve Good Men," and, more recently, the work on "George William Ward and the Oxford Movement," are among its varied products. What that movement has done for the Church may be a matter of dispute; but it has certainly added four pleasant books of biography to English letters. Cardinal Newman's sketch portrays that period of storm and stress from the point of one who was a chief actor in it. Mr. Mozley's delicious pages depict for us the various personages who filled the stage as they might appear from the side scenes or prompter's box. Dean Burgon gives us the view of one who heartily sympathized with the movement in its Tractarian beginning, and was fiercely indignant with it in its Romanizing close. And now Mr. Wilfrid Ward, in this life of his father, presents the story as told by a fair-minded observer, with only hereditary interest in it. Himself a born Romanist, he is quite ready to recognize the work of the men from whom his father went out, and to avail himself of their rich contributions to a successful study of his father's position and character. Certainly the Oxford movement becomes more intelligible as we see it by the light of these admirably-written pages. The forthcoming lives of Dean Stanley and Dr. Pusey may be expected to yet more fully disclose its meaning.

The period about 1830 was everywhere a time of ferment and revolution. Almost everything was an open question. Almost every institution had to prove anew its right to survive. The English Church was no exception. The friends of the Establishment were compelled to consider how best to buttress that ancient structure. There was the great mass of "High and Dry" and "Low and Slow," who only wished to " conserve chaos" and let things be as they were in secula seculorum. There were the headlong innovators who would like to divert the revenues of the Church to purposes of science and education. There were ardent friends, like Dr. Arnold, who held State and Church to be but differing names for the one national life; who felt that Christianity itself was in danger, and sought, therefore, to broaden

* GEORGE WILLIAM WARD AND THE OXFORD MOVEMENT. By Wilfrid Ward. New York: Macmillan & Co.

the Church until it should contain and harmonize all the earnest elements of English faith.

There was another group of scholars and ecclesiastics, to whom the churchmanship of Laud and Andrews was a fond ideal, who looked back to a church that had not only preserved the primitive deposit but also some later developments which the course of the Reformation had rashly sacrificed. They were profoundly alarmed at the secularizing and Erastian tendencies of their time. They were painfully aware of the hardness and shallowness of the popular theology, and sought a healthy revival of Catholic, not Papal, dogma in the English Church. This was the attitude of men like Keble and Rose and Palmer and Wilberforce. It was at first the position of Newman. He believed the only way of meeting at once the perils from revolutionary statesmen and Papal ecclesiastics was to intensify the life of the Church by reinserting the elements possessed by all Christendom before the days of Luther. He fancied that there was a Via Media between Rome and Geneva which the English Church might yet pursue. as he looked to the Patristic writings for indications of that primitive pathway, as he glanced enviously at the existing Papal Church to see what of her present possessions an English churchman could profitably reclaim, his gaze became fascinated. His subtilizing intellect perplexed itself. Could it be that the Catholic Church which he sought, the ideal Church which he looked back for in history, was still, in its perfection, extant? that it was not the question how to enrich the English Church without accepting the corruptions of Rome, but rather how to transfer the allegiance of an English ecclesiastic, self-convicted of schism, to the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church which had its sempiternal seat at Rome, its persistent authority, as the One Body of Christ, over every honest and earnest believer?

But

While Dr. Newman was weaving delicate cobwebs about his own position,-cobwebs that a more direct and straightforward intellect had never spun or had quickly broken through,one of his coadjutors and associates, who had been his devoted disciple, grew restive as he saw each new subtle filament added to the web or floating without attachment in the void. Himself a born logician, he knew no interval between a demonstration and the deed which should follow it. The facts forced him to the front. He assumed the leadership, for