Central America since it threw off the dominion of Spain, and above all, a very elaborate view of the geography and topography of Nicaragua, as connected with the proposed interoceanic canal. Mr. Squier writes on all these subjects from personal knowledge and investigation, and with the freshness and power of a man who has got all his information at first hand. The work is profusely illustrated with appropriate engravings from drawings made on the spot, and is also well supplied with accurate maps. Bating some redundancies of style proceeding from a mania for fine writing, these volumes are, from their intrinsic and permanent value, worthy of more general attention than almost any work of the season. * * * * * _Wesley and Methodism. By Isaac Taylor. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1 vol. 12 mo._ The author of this valuable and thoughtful volume is extensively known both in England and the United States as a philosophic writer on the great themes and great exponents of Christian faith. As in a former volume he considered Jesuitism in Loyola, its founder, so in this he views Methodism in Wesley. His penetrative and meditative mind, equally acute and sympathetic, readily discovers the connection between opinions and character, principles and persons; and by viewing sects and systems psychologically and historically in the characters and lives of their founders, he gives the interest of biography to the discussion of the most metaphysical questions of theology. His present work is eminently original and suggestive, evincing on every page the movement of a deep and earnest nature, and an intellect at once critical and interpretative. His own religious nature is too profound to allow his indulgence in any of those phrases of sarcasm, contempt, or pity, which it used to be fashionable to speak of Methodism and Methodists; but though he considers the religious movement which he analyses and represents as a genuine development of the principal elements of Christianity, and as second only to the Reformation in importance among the providential modes of vitalizing and diffusing the faith, he is still calm, reasonable and austerely just in his judgments. His criticism of the prominent Methodists is an example. He sees clearly that they were not great men mentally. “Let it be confessed,” he says, “that this company does not include one mind of that amplitude and grandeur, the contemplation of which, as a natural object—a sample of humanity—excites a pleasurable awe, and swells the bosom with a vague ambition, or with a noble emulation. Not one of the founders of Methodism can claim to stand on any such high level; nor was one of them gifted with the philosophic faculty—the abstractive and analytic power. More than one was a shrewd and exact logician, but none a master of the higher reason. Not one was erudite in more than an ordinary degree; not