and at last so triumphantly surmounted. In addition to his professional greatness, Dr. Sims was greatly beloved for the virtues of his private life. He was in the latter years a most sincere and devout Christian, and succeeded in avoiding that taint of scepticism, which so often shows itself in the medical fraternity. OUR GREAT BENEFACTORS. SHORT BIOGRAPHIES OF THE MEN AND WOMEN MOST EMINENT IN LITERATURE, SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY, PHILANTHROPY, ART, ETC. Edited by Samuel Adams Drake, Author of “New England Legends and Folk-Lore,” etc. With Nearly One Hundred Portraits Emblematically Embellished. Boston: _Roberts Brothers_. This volume of something over five hundred pages, is very briefly, but yet truthfully, summed up in its title. The biographies are short and well written, and the author knows how to be graphic and picturesque without being in the least diffuse. He has selected the great leading personages in the arts of peace, who have exemplified human progress among the English speaking races, and given short sketches of them in chronological order. Boys will be specially interested in such a volume, and find in it both amusement and benefit. History has been defined as “philosophy teaching by example.” If this is the case with history, it is still more true of biography, for the concrete flesh and blood facts are brought much nearer home to the imagination than can be possible in history. The sketches vary from five to fifteen pages long, and are completely given, omitting no essential fact in the career, or essential trait in the character of those treated. The book is beautifully embellished with portraits. LIFE OF MARY WOOLSTONECRAFT. By Elizabeth Robins Pennell. Boston: _Roberts Brothers_.