The quaint and ingenious interpretations which we find scattered through these pages will repay reading, even when we think his glosses forced and eccentric. To find a man in this age of the world, after the raging of eighteen hundred years of exhaustive religious and dogmatic controversy, who fancies that he has something new and startling to say on the problems propounded in the Bible, is a refreshing fact which should not go without brief comment. THE ELEMENTS OF MORAL SCIENCE, THEORETICAL AND PRACTICAL. By Noah Porter, D.D., LL.D., President of Yale College. New York: _Charles Scribner’s Sons_. The remarkable President of Yale College, whose name is treasured up in the hearts of thousands of the alumni of Yale as one of the wisest, most genial, and lovable of the many distinguished instructors associated with the history of the college, gives us in this study of ethics the ripe and mellowed fruit of his thought and work. For many years President Porter was the professor of mental and moral philosophy before he assumed the headship of the college. The substance of the book before us was originally given in the shape of lectures before the senior classes. We are told that the book is not designed for a scientific treatise, but to meet the wants of those students and readers who, though somewhat mature in their philosophical thinking and disciplined in their mental habits, still require expanded definitions and abundant illustrations involving more or less of repetition. Dr. Porter has in his own line of investigation great clearness of statement, and the power, perhaps growing out of the needs of the class-room, of familiarizing and simplifying abstruse reasonings. We find this strikingly illustrated in the book before us. It is masterly in its lucidity of reasoning, and in its applications often so practical as to make us feel that the object of the author is not merely to lay bare the scientific theory of ethics, but to bring its principles home to the heart and sympathy of his readers. As a dialectical exposition the cut-and-dried philosopher who revels in the abstract formulas of Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and others may find occasion to criticise Dr. Porter’s methods. But to the general reader the speculations of Dr. Porter will prove none the less interesting because he brings them down to the sympathies and interests of men. FOREIGN LITERARY NOTES. Dr. Stratmann, the compiler of the excellent “Dictionary of the Old English Language,” has died at Cologne at the age of sixty-two. The engagement is announced of Mr. G. E. Buckle, the editor of the _Times_, to Miss Alice Payn, the third daughter of the distinguished novelist and editor of the _Cornhill Magazine_.