Mr. White's book is, throughout, written with an amount of information, a scholarly intelligence and care, and a studied moderation of feeling, which place it above most books of its class, and entitle it to a permanent place in the library. It will have value when the interest of ephemeral books of mere travel has passed away. POLITICS, SCIENCE, AND ART. _The Transformation of Insects._ By P. MARTIN DUNCAN, F.R.S. Cassell, Petter, and Galpin. The metamorphoses of insects comprise some of the most interesting phenomena of the most attractive class in the animal kingdom. They lose none of their attractions in the hands of the enterprising publishers to whose energy the public are already indebted for so many handsome and profusely illustrated works on various branches of natural history. The present volume, like the rest, abounds in pictures of all kinds, from those which are diagrammatic, and should accompany a scientific treatise, to those which are highly pictorial and life-like; and they are all of high merit. Of course, the illustrations, for the most part, are not original. They do not come from the hand of the author, nor were they designed to illustrate his text. No work with such first-class engravings, drawn expressly to elucidate the meaning of a writer, could be produced at ten times the cost of the book before us. Collected from all sources, and more or less judiciously distributed through the volume, the plates constitute the chief value of the work. The letter-press, however, like the illustrations, is full of interesting matter. Almost all the well-known facts which science has revealed to us concerning the whole life-history of the _Arthropoda_, are stripped of their technical phraseology, invested in an amusing, and sometimes a grotesque garb, and displayed so as to attract those to whom real scientific study would be repulsive. To our youth, and to that numerous class of casual and unscientific observers of Nature who rather delight in interesting facts than in the causes which underlie them, 'The Transformation' will, no doubt, be found amusing and satisfactory. On the other hand, we are bound to state that there is nothing in the book before us, either in the shape of original contribution to our information, or of philosophic grouping of phenomena into wider generalizations, which will really assist the scientific student.