In the remaining portion of the second volume Mr. Buckle gives a very vigorous description of the intellectual progress of the Scotch during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His account of Adam Smith as a writer is peculiarly brilliant. His views of Hume and Reid are ably drawn. Thence he proceeds to discuss the discoveries of Black and Leslie in natural philosophy, of Smith and Hutton in geology, of Cavendish in chemistry, of Cullen and Hunter in physiology and pathology. These discussions are interesting, and show a great range of knowledge and power of study in the writer. Yet they are episodes, and have little bearing on the main course of his thought. We have thus given a cursory survey of these volumes. We do not think Buckle's philosophy sound, his method good, or his doctrines tenable. Yet we cannot but sympathize with one who has devoted his strength and youth with such untiring industry to such a great enterprise. And we must needs be touched with the plaintive confession which breaks from his wearied mind and exhausted hope in the last volume, when he accepts the defeat of his early endeavor, and submits to the disappointment of his youthful hope. We should be glad to quote the entire passage,[33] because it is the best in the book, and because he expresses in it, in the most condensed form, his ideas and purposes as an historic writer. But our limited space allows us only to commend it to the special attention of the reader. VOLTAIRE[34] Mr. Parton has given us in these volumes[35] another of his interesting and instructive biographies. Not as interesting, indeed, as some others,--for example, as his life of Andrew Jackson; nor as instructive as his lives of Franklin and of Jefferson. The nature of the case made this impossible. The story of Jackson had never been told till Mr. Parton undertook it. It was a history of frontier life, of strange adventures, of desperate courage, of a force of character which conquered all obstacles and achieved extraordinary results; a story "Of moving accidents by flood and field, Of hair-breadth 'scapes i' the imminent deadly breach, Of being taken by the insolent foe."