THIS is a most useful manual for the collector of old china and articles of _vertu_, a guide based on long and large practical experience. The book is partly historic, and the chapters on “Ancient Pottery” and “The Mediæval and Renaissance Periods” will be perhaps the most interesting to our readers. But those whose tastes are more modern than antiquarian will derive more pleasure from the chapters relating the story of the introduction of porcelain into Europe; while nobody, however large his or her own experience may be, can afford to despise or to dispense with the lists of the marks and monograms adopted by the Wedgwoods, the Spodes, the Copelands, and other manufacturers of pottery, or with the “hints and cautions to collectors” to be found on pp. 191-199. The illustrations are numerous and excellent; and the little work can boast the merit of a very careful index. _Phallicism._ By HARGRAVE JENNINGS. G. Redway. 1884. This book is written _ad clerum_, and appeals to the scholar only, and not to the multitude. It is a masterly and exhaustive account of that worship of the creative powers of nature which, under various names, has prevailed among all the nations of antiquity and of mediæval times, alike in Egypt and India, in Italy and Gaul, among the Israelites of old, and among the primitive inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland. Mr. Jennings treats of his subject in its celestial and terrestrial, its heathen and Christian aspects; and he traces its connection with the Gnostics, the Buddhists, and the Rosicrucians. He sees Phallicism in the obelisks and pyramids of the Nile, in the monolithic circles of Stonehenge and of Avebury, and in the Round Towers of Ireland. A worship or cult so ancient and so widely spread, it is clear, must have a history, and a curious one; and this Mr. Jennings has traced in a way so scholarly as to leave little or nothing to be said by others. He has carried his inquiry much further back, and also in many more countries, than all previous writers, including Mr. R. P. Knight, who drew his pictures of Phallic worship chiefly from what he had himself witnessed in Italy and the South of France. It will surprise very many of our readers to learn that the erection of the Tower of Babel was probably an early outburst of this worship, and that its hidden and mystic meaning was the same as that of the Round Towers in “the sister island,” which were nothing more or less than fire towers, expressive of the ancient faith of the Parsees. How far these speculations are true in fact, must be left to the learned to decide. But certainly the work before us will be found a most valuable auxiliary to all who care to pursue such a subject of inquiry, a subject for which Mr. Jennings is the better fitted on account of his long and intimate acquaintance with the Rosicrucians, their tenets, and their practices. The issue of the work is limited to 400 copies for English subscribers.