serves at least to show the impression it made on an eye-witness. Major Hoffman's remarks on the causes of the moral breakdown of the Empire and of the French army do not help us to much that is novel. He lays more than the usual stress on Ultramontanism as an influence. The death of the archbishop of Paris could have been prevented, he thinks, had the Versailles authorities acted with due promptness and determination; and he avers his belief that the liberalism of that prelate made his death not unacceptable to the Church party represented now by Eugenie and MacMahon. He ascribes fanaticism also to the savior of Paris that was to be--Trochu. Trochu's main hope, he believes, was miraculous interposition. His statement of the extent to which unreasoning panic had possession of both soldiers and citizens supports the idea that supernatural aid only could have saved the city. The better, and really ruling, traits of the French people are not to be studied in their periods of "Gallic fury." Thus it is that the book before us is an unsafe guide on that point. Six years have rolled away since the revolt of the Commune, the loss of two rich provinces and the imposition of a tribute nearly half as large as the debt of the United States. The evidence given and the effective results shown of patience, perseverance, order, determined good faith, industry and self-control have no parallel in a like period of the history of any modern people. The Plains of the Great West and their Inhabitants. By R. I. Dodge. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Here we are favored with a glance through another military lorgnette, but at a scene geographically, socially and politically the antipodes of Paris. Colonel Dodge leads us into the haunts of the original denizens of Western America, and depicts their traits with a hand made facile by long familiarity. At part of the aborigines--and that part obviously most attractive to and most assiduously studied by him--he bids us look through the sights of the rifle or along the dappled double-barrel. At the other he essays, with less success perhaps, to aid us with the eye of the amateur statesman and political economist. The wearers of fur and feather have no moral side. The Indian has. His condition and future are correspondingly complicated. How to shoot him is not the sole and simple question, as it is with his original compatriots except the buffalo. With the latter shaggy and multitudinous creature the fate of the Indian of the Plains is more or less linked. They move together, and may be said to die together. On a map of the territory between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi are traced two pairs of reservations. Of one the Yellowstone, and of the other the Arkansas, is the centre. Each pair is composed of a buffalo-range and a group of Indian tribes. The three lines of east-and-west railway separate them, and shoulder to right and left, north and south, the savage and his herds.