So well was her work done, that Comte himself adapted it for his students’ use, discarding his own edition. So it came to pass that Comte’s own work fell out of use, and that his complete teachings became accessible only to his countrymen through a retranslation of Miss Martineau’s original translation and adaptation. Remarkable as were her philosophical powers, her work in the domain of imagination, though always hinging on a serious purpose, was of a superior sort. A keen and successful student of political economy, she wrote a series of remarkable tales, based on various perplexing problems in this line of thought and research. In addition to these, her pathetic and humorous tales are full of charm, and distinguished by a style equally charming and forcible. She might have been a great novelist had not her fondness for philosophical studies become the passion of her life. She was an indefatigable contributor to newspapers and magazines on a great variety of subjects, though she generally wrote anonymously. It was for this reason that her literary labors, which were arduous in the extreme, were comparatively ill-paid, and that life, even in her old age, was no easy struggle for her. The work, among her voluminous writings, on which her fame will probably rest as on a corner-stone, is “A History of the Thirty Years Peace.” This is a history of her own time, pungent, full of powerful color, though often sombre, impartial yet searching, characterized by the sternest love of truth, and couched in a literary style of great force and clearness. She showed the rare power of discussing events which were almost contemporary, as calmly as if she were surveying a remote period of antiquity. The _Athenæum_ said of this book on its publication: “The principles which she enunciates are based on eternal truths, and evolved with a logical precision that admits rhetorical ornament without becoming obscure or confused.” Another remarkable work was “Eastern Life,” the fruit of research in the East. In this she made a bold and masterly attack on the dogmatic beliefs of Christianity. The end and object of her reasoning in this work is: That men have ever constructed the Image of a Ruler of the Universe out of their own minds; that all successive ideas about the Supreme Being have originated from within and been modified by the surrounding circumstances; and that all theologies, therefore, are baseless productions of the human imagination and have no essential connection with those great religious ideas and emotions by which men are constrained to live nobly, to do justly, and to love what they see to be the true and right. The publication of this book raised a storm of opprobrium, for England was then far more illiberal than now. Yet it is a singular fact that, in spite of her free-thinking, Harriet Martineau had as her intimate friends and warm admirers some of the most pious and sincere clergymen of the age. She died in 1876 at the