inherent and abiding, and he takes care not to let us forget that the struggle to subdue them cannot anywhere or at any time be safely relaxed. We inherit, with their other possessions, the weaknesses and proclivities of our ancestors, and we even find some of their specific acts of error and injustice still imbedded in the institutions under which we live, and more or less vividly reproduced in the routine of individual, corporate or public existence. The compurgator slides into the witness and the juryman, bringing with him the oath on the Bible and trial for perjury, and the feed champion of the Church into the patron. The ordeal of battle is fought out bloodlessly by lawyers, with often quite as little regard to the merits of the case as could have been shown in the olden lists. Only the baser physical ordeals, of fire, hot and cold water, etc., with torture as a part of the regular machinery of justice, have died out, evidencing the great rise in intelligence and independence of the bulk of the people--the "lower orders" to whom these gross expedients were chiefly applied. Other forms of legal outrage, however, less apparent and palpable to the senses, have run deep into the nineteenth century, and are not yet wholly abolished. Mr. Lea, by the way, does not, we observe, refer to the trial of Bambridge in 1729 for torturing prisoners for debt "in violation of the laws of England." Perhaps he threw it aside in the redundance of other illustrative material. We must add, as proof of his impartiality, the comparatively slight mention made of torture under the Inquisition--a thing of which we have been told so much as to have fallen into a sort of popular belief that the Holy Office had a monopoly of this particular atrocity. Man will always, in some guise or other, manifest his faith in and dependence on miracles, and will never cease to implore the special interposition of the Deity. It is so much simpler thus to make a daily convenience of his Creator than to consult those dry abstractions, the laws of Nature. Of this deep and tiresome _x_ and _y_ he has not time to solve the equation, granting it to be, in its ultimate terms, soluble. Who shall say in each instance whether the impulse to decline that method and adopt the shorter be superstition or religion? Whether looked on as a picture or a mirror, a work such as this has lasting value. It enables us at any time to gauge the progress of enlightenment, to ascertain what real gain has been made, what is delusive, and what remains to be done that it is possible to do; for we must not expect the record of human fatuity to be closed in our day. The Witchery of Archery. By Maurice Thompson. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.