To the department of philosophy a somewhat remarkable contribution is to be noticed, under the title of _The Progress of the Intellect as exemplified in the religious development of the Greeks and Hebrews_. The writer is Mr. Robert William Mackay. Its design is to explain by a rationalistic process all the religious faiths and beliefs which have exerted the greatest influence over man, and to refer them exclusively to moral and intellectual development. In this design the writer may, or may not, have succeeded; but it is certain, making all draw-backs on the score of what has probably been borrowed from German investigation, that the book has high pretensions to eloquence and research, and reminds us of a time when publication was less frequent than now, and a single book might embody the labor of a life. For its antidote in respect of opinion and purpose there has been published, not inopportunely, after a peaceful slumber of nearly two centuries in the library at Wotton, _A Rational Account of the True Religion_, by John Evelyn. Here the design is, by all possible arguments and authorities, to confirm our faith in Christianity. We must speak very summarily and briefly of the publications in general literature. Of books of travel and adventure, the most attractive and interesting in point of subject is, _Five Years of a Hunter's Life in the Far Interior of South Africa_, by Mr. Roualeyn Gordon Cumming, a kinsman of the Chief of Argyll, in whom a love of deer-stalking seems to have gradually expanded into dimensions too gigantic to be satisfied with any thing less than the stalking of the lion, the elephant, the hippopotamus, the giraffe, or the rhinoceros. The book is filled with astonishing incidents and anecdotes, and keeps the reader very nearly as breathless with excitement as the elephant and lion-hunter himself must have been. Copious extracts from the work will be found in the preceding pages of this number.--Mr. Aubrey de Vere has published some very graceful _Picturesque Sketches of Greece and Turkey_; and the brave and high-minded old General Pepe has given the world, _A Narrative of Scenes and Events in Italy from 1847 to 1849_. Mr. Johnson, the distinguished geographer of Edinburgh, has issued the most complete _General Gazetteer of the World_ that has yet been comprised in a single volume; and as part of the republication of the treatises of the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, in separate and portable volumes, we have to mention an interesting volume on Greek Literature by Mr. Justice Talfourd, the Bishop of London, and other accomplished scholars.--In poetical translation, a new version of _AEschylus_ by Professor Blackie, of Aberdeen, has been issued; and in poetry, with the title of _In Memoriam_, a noble and affecting series of elegies to the memory of a friend (son of the historian Hallam), from the pen of Mr. Alfred Tennyson.