We cannot dismiss this book without saying a word or two in praise of its externals. Handsome books are, happily, no longer so rare a product of the American press as to require heralding when they do appear, but this is so beautiful a specimen of the art of book-manufacturing that it deserves special commendation. The type, paper, press-work, and illustrations are all admirable, and the whole is a result not easily to be surpassed in any part of the world.
My Farm of Edgewood. A Country Book. By the Author of "Reveries of a Bachelor." New York: Charles Scribner. 12mo.
When "Ik Marvel" ten years ago turned farmer, a good proportion of the reading public supposed that his experiment would combine the defects of gentleman- and poet-farming, and that he would escape the bankruptcy of Shenstone only by possessing the purse of Astor. That a man of refined sentiments, elegant tastes, wide cultivation, and humane and tender genius, given, moreover, to indulgences in "Reveries" and the "Dream-Life," should succeed in the real business of agriculture, seemed a monstrous supposition to those cockney idealists who consider the cultivation of the mind incompatible with the cultivation of the ground, who cannot bring, by any theory of the association of ideas, practical talent into neighborly good-will with lofty aspirations, and who necessarily connect the government of brutes with an imbruted intelligence. The book we have under review is a blunt contradiction to objectors of the literary class. That it is practical, the coarsest farmer must admit; that its practicality is not purchased by any mean and unwise concessions to "popular prejudice," the most sensitive littérateur will concede; and that the whole representation constitutes a most charming book, all readers will be eager to pronounce. Indeed, the critic of the volume is somewhat puzzled to harmonize the fine rhythm of the periods, and the superb propriety of the tone, with the subject-matter. The bleakest and most ghastly aspects of Nature,—the most prosaic facts of the farmer's life,—Irish servants and compost-heaps,—cows which try to consume their own milk,—beehives which send forth swarms to sting the children of the house, and give no honey,—soils which refuse to bear the products which intelligence has anticipated,—all are transformed into "something rich and strange" by the poet's alchemy, without any sacrifice of truth, or the insertion of details which a farmer would disavow as inaccurate or sentimental. The "Ik" is a full counterpoise to the "Marvel," even to the most literal reader of the volume, though it is certain that no book has ever before appeared in our country in which the farmer-life of New England has assumed so poetic a form. The "chiel" among the agriculturists "taking notes" will be more likely to seduce than to warn; and if the record of his eventual triumphs be received as gospel truth, we must expect a vast emigration of the men of mind from the cities to the country. Who would not cheerfully encounter all the vexations attending a settlement in "My Farm in Edgewood" for the compensations so bountifully provided for the privations?
To the literary reader the doubt will arise, whether the writer of this work might not have more profitably employed his time, during the last ten years, in creating thoughts than in "improving" land,—in diffusing information than in selling milk. As a poetic, scientific, and practical farmer, he has doubtless silenced all cynic doubts of his capacity to make four or six per cent. on the capital he invested in land; but it is plain, that, without capital, he might have made three or four times as much by the genial exercise of his literary power. The talent exercised on his farm we must, therefore, consider from a financial point of view to have been more or less wasted. As a "gentleman-farmer," he might easily have repaired from his study all the losses which his trained subordinates of the garden and the field incurred from the lack of his constant superintendence. Everything which a man of mind could want in a country-residence might have been obtained without his personal oversight of every minute detail, and the net result of the gains of the year would have been greater, if, instead of riding daily into New Haven to sell his milk, he had stayed quietly in his study to write for the magazines. This calculation we have made from a rigid scrutiny of the figures in which the author sums up, year after year, his gains.
We have been provoked into this comparison by the evident glee with which Ik Marvel parades the results of his agricultural labors. So earnest is he to show that a man of genius can make money by farming, that he is inclined to overlook the distinction between the work of an ordinary and that of an extraordinary mind. Waiving this consideration, we have nothing to object to his ten years' seclusion from literature. That seclusion has brought him into contact with the rough realities of a farmer's life, has enabled him personally to inspect every process of agriculture, and furnish his mind with an entirely new class of facts. The result is a book whose merit can hardly be overpraised. It should be in every farmer's library, as a volume full of practical advice to aid his daily work, and full of ennobling suggestions to lift his calling into a kind of epic dignity. As a book for the generality of readers, it far exceeds any previous work of the author in force, naturalness, and beauty, in vividness of description and richness of style, and in that indefinable element of genius which envelops the most prosaic details in an atmosphere of refinement and grace.
Methods of Study in Natural History. By L. Agassiz. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 12mo.
A work from the scientific storehouse of Professor Agassiz needs only to have attention called to its existence to command universal welcome. The readers of the "Atlantic" are already in some measure familiar with its contents, being a reprint of a series of papers published in this journal; but they will be read again with double satisfaction in this continuous form. The avowed purpose is "to give some general hints to young students as to the methods by which scientific truth has been reached."
There are many lovers of Nature, and many students of Nature; but there are very few whom we may term philosophers of Nature. In other words, there are those who are charmed with the external world, its landscapes, its beauteous forms and tints, and all its various adaptations to fascinate the senses,—and those who delight in deciphering and describing all the details of individual objects, and their wonderful fitness to the role they have severally or unitedly to play; and there is the man who, endowed with all this, seeks to go still farther, and from myriads of observations to deduce great general truths. He is the philosopher.
When Agassiz arrived in this country, there were many good observers of Nature here, and many who had accumulated a large store of facts. Each one had been working in his own way, almost alone, scarcely knowing the ultimate aims of scientific research, much less knowing how to arrive at them. To him, more than to any other person, zoölogists in this country are indebted for showing them how to work, and for presenting to them a plan to be worked out, with processes and means by which this is to be done. And now he designs to diffuse these high aims and methods throughout the community. As he says, "The time has come when scientific truth must cease to be the property of the few, when it must be woven into the common life of the world." Of all men, he is the one to gain the ear and understanding of the public on such matters, and to command the recognition of his conclusions. His faculty of simplifying great principles, and of clothing them in such language and with such illustrations as to render them intelligible and attractive to the uninstructed, is one of Professor Agassiz's most rare characteristics. In these chapters he has unfolded some of the methods by which high scientific results have been and may be attained, and has well illustrated them. In a short sketch of the progress of Natural History, he has noticed the methods which were successively pursued in its study, and the long time which elapsed before anything like true science was developed; he has pointed out the necessity and nature of classification, the important terms employed, as classes, orders, families, genera, and species, and their signification, and dwells upon the great idea that all the denominations represented by these terms exist definitely in Nature, and can be legitimate and permanent only as they conform to the plan laid down by Nature herself. Much of the work is devoted to the enforcement of this doctrine. He shows us, more especially by the class of Radiates, how objects at first view widely different all conform to the same definite plan, and how some which during a part of their history would not be suspected of having any alliance with each other, yet, by alternate generations, come to be identical. He shows, by the ovarian egg, the great simplicity and apparent identity of the beginnings of all animal life, and the successive steps by which the diversified forms of animals are developed, and insists upon the necessity of following the history of an animal through all its phases before its true place in the grand plan can be determined. He discusses the permanence of species, and the limits of their variation, which he illustrates more especially by the growth of corals, and most emphatically expresses his dissent from the startling development-doctrines of Darwin. But it would be fruitless to attempt an abstract of the numerous truths he has alluded to, and the methods by which such truths are to be sought. It is to these truths, in contradistinction to the mere study and description of species, and the building up of systems on external characters alone, that he hopes to direct attention. Those comprehensive truths are few. Agassiz tells us, that, after a whole life devoted to the study of Nature, a simple sentence may express all he himself has done: "I have shown that there is a correspondence between the succession of fishes in geological times and the different stages of their growth in the egg,—this is all." Though this is by no means the limit of his claim so modestly expressed, yet that was a grand generalization, and, like the great doctrine of gravitation, and the demonstration by Cuvier of the existence of races of animals and plants on the globe anterior to those now existing, it proves to be of almost indefinite application, and, like those doctrines, has revolutionized science.
The peculiar scientific views here presented this is no place to criticize. But we may say that to every student of liberal culture this work is essential. Every teacher's table and every school-library should be furnished with it.