Another volume curiously illustrative of the past, has been published with the uninviting title of Consuetudines Kanciæ. This is, in other words, a history of the Gavelkind, and other remarkable customs of the County of Kent. The author is a skilled antiquary, and gives many sound reasons for his belief that in not a few of those peculiar customs may be directly traced the famous and venerable laws of Edward the Confessor.
Doctor Latham has added to those researches and speculations as to races which have lately been found to explain so much of the peculiarities of national habits, customs, and laws, a sketch of the Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies.
Dr. Lingard's valuable library has been bequeathed by the late learned historian to St. Cuthbert's College, Ushaw.
The Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung has been seized and confiscated by the police at Leipzig, for having published, under the head of Great Britain, a notice, with translated extracts, of the two letters written by Mr. Gladstone to the Earl of Aberdeen on the treatment of the Neapolitan state prisoners.
The death of the famous naturalist, Dr. Lorenz Oken, whose theory of the Cranial Homologies effected a revolution in philosophical anatomy, and led the way to the admirable researches of Owen, has recently been announced. The name of Oken is most commonly associated by English readers with his "Physio-philosophy," a translation of which work, by Mr. Tulk, was published by the Ray Society. It abounds in admirable generalizations, unfortunately immersed in much that is false and fantastic, and clothed in the cloudiest phraseology of German transcendental metaphysics. Oken's researches and speculations (for he was as practical as he was dreamy) extended over all departments of natural history. Of the value he set upon facts, and the industry with which he collected them, a lasting monument exists in the volumes of the "Isis," a vast library of abstracts of the science of his time, founded and conducted by him as a periodical. Few men have had greater influence on European science than Oken. Until forced to quit Germany on account of his political opinions, he held a Professorship at Jena. Latterly he was Professor of Natural History at the University of Zurich, in which city he died about the last of August, at the advanced age of seventy-three years.