made Rome great; but it left her people, as a race, so physically exhausted that the weakest tribes of the North dictated to her the terms of her degradation. The physical character of a nation moulds its intellectual nature, and shapes its destinies. The study of health is therefore the great study, and it will be found in all things accordant with those loftier truths taught by the Great Physician. Strangers of intelligence often remark that, with unbounded means of happiness, affluence for every reasonable want, security against every danger, and the high prerogatives of conscious and elevated freedom, we are still the most unhappy of the sons of Adam. They assert that we grow old before our time; are restless, excitable, and ever worrying for an attainment, in reference to some ruling passion beyond our reach. Comfort, health, calmness, and content, are sacrificed to grasp at something more. Our cheeks grow pale, our brows wrinkled, our hearts clouded, from a settled, taught, established habit of discontent with any position that is not the highest. There is much of truth in all this, as every one who treads our crowded marts and finds each man, however prosperous, cankered with the thought that he is not prosperous enough, will admit. All this constitutes American energy; all this renders our country great in the world's eye; but does it constitute happiness? It may be gravely doubted. The study of health is essentially the study of happiness. Life is with our people, as a general rule, a thing of little value. Those who think, in a better spirit, and remember its duties and its ends, will come to a different conclusion, and regard the conservation of the even and steady physical energies of the body as superior in importance to any result to be gained by the forced and unnatural efforts from which more is attained than nature sanctions. A work like the one before us is calculated to be of great service, and especially so if it be placed in the hands of children. It claims, and certainly deserves, no praise as an original work of science; but it has this merit--no ordinary one--that it communicates the most important truths of physiology in language which any intelligent child can understand; and does so in a manner that every moralist will commend. _The Fruits and Fruit Trees of America. By A. J. Downing. Published by Wiley & Putnam, New York._