Authors of the Homilies (Vol. iv., p. 346.).
—Allow me to say that in the reply to the inquiry of G. R. C. one work is omitted which will afford at once all that is wanted: for the Preface to Professor Corrie's recent edition of the Homilies, printed at the Pitt Press, contains the most circumstantial account of their authors.
W. K. C.
College, Ely.
Miscellaneous.
NOTES ON BOOKS, SALES, CATALOGUES, ETC.
We had occasion, some short time since, to speak in terms of deserved commendation of the excellent Handbook to the Antiquities of the British Museum which had been prepared by Mr. Vaux. Another and most important department of our great national collection has just found in Dr. Mantell an able scientific, yet popular expositor of its treasures. His Petrifactions and their Teachings, or a Handbook to the Gallery of Organic Remains in the British Museum, forms the new volume of Bohn's Scientific Library; and, thanks to the acquirements of Dr. Mantell, his good sense in divesting his descriptions, as much as possible, of technical language, and the numerous well-executed woodcuts by which it is illustrated, the work is admirably calculated to accomplish the purpose for which it has been prepared; namely, to serve as a handbook to the general visitor to the Gallery of Organic Remains, and as an explanatory Catalogue for the more scientific observer.
To satisfy the deep interest taken by many persons, who are unable to study the phenomena themselves, in the numerous new and remarkable facts relating to the formation and temperature of the globe, and to the movements of the ocean and of the atmosphere, as well as to the influence of both on climate, and on the adaptation of the earth for the dwelling of man, which the exertions of scientific men have of late years revealed, was the motive which led Professor Buff to write his Familiar Letters on the Physics of the Earth; treating of the chief Movements of the Land, the Waters, and the Air, and the Forces that give rise to them: and Dr. Hoffman has been induced to undertake an English edition of them from a desire of rendering accessible to the public a source of information from which he has derived no less of profit than of pleasure: which profit and which pleasure will, we have no doubt, be shared by a large number of readers of this unpretending but very instructive little volume.
Welsh Sketches, chiefly Ecclesiastical, to the close of the Twelfth Century. These sketches, which treat of Bardism, the Kings of Wales, the Welsh Church, Monastic Institutions, and Giraldus Cambrensis, are from the pen of the amiable author of the Essays on Church Union, and are written in the same attractive and popular style.
About five-and-thirty years ago the Treatment of the Insane formed the subject of a Parliamentary inquiry, and the public mind was shocked by the appalling scenes revealed before a Committee of the House of Commons. But the publication of them did its work; for that such scenes are now but matters of history, we owe to that inquiry. The condition of the London Poor, in like manner, is now in the course of investigation; not indeed by an official commission, but by a private individual, Mr. Henry Mayhew, who is gathering by personal visits to the lowest haunts of poverty and its attendant vices, and from personal communication with the people he is describing, an amount of fact illustrative of the social conditions of the poorest classes in this metropolis, which deserves, and must receive, the earnest attention of the statesman, the moralist, and the philanthropist. His work is entitled London Labour and the London Poor, a Cyclopædia of the Condition and Earnings of those that WILL work, those that CANNOT work, and those that WILL NOT work. Vol. I. The London Street Folk, is just completed. It is of most painful interest, for it paints in vivid colours the misery, ignorance, and demoralisation in which thousands are living at our very doors; and its perusal must awaken in every right-minded man an earnest desire to do his part towards assisting the endeavours of the honest poor to earn their bread—towards instructing the ignorant, and towards reforming the vicious.