Mr. Hazlitt's General Introduction supplies us with no new information, but this was hardly to be expected where Mr. Dyce had already gone over the field. We wish that he had been able to give us better means of distinguishing the three almost contemporary John Websters one from the other, for we think the internal evidence is enough to show that all the plays attributed to the author of the "Duchess" and "Vittoria" could not have been written by the same author. On the whole, he has given us a very respectable, and certainly a very pretty, edition of an eminent poet. In leaving the subject, we cannot but express our satisfaction in comparing with these examples of English editorship the four volumes of Ballads recently published by Mr. Child. They are an honor to American scholarship and fidelity. Taste, learning, and modesty, the three graces of editorship, seem to have presided over the whole work. We hope soon, also, to be able to chronicle another creditable achievement in Mr. White's Shakspeare, which we look for with great interest. _History of the Inductive Sciences, from the Earliest to the Present Time_. By WILLIAM WHEWELL, D.D., Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Third Edition, with Additions. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1858. 2 vols. 8vo. pp. 566, 648. We are heartily glad to welcome this reprint of the "History of the Inductive Sciences," from an improved edition. From an intimate acquaintance with the first edition, we should cordially recommend these volumes to those who wish to take a general survey of this department of human learning. The various subjects are, for the most part, treated in a manner intelligible and agreeable to the unlearned reader. As an authority, Whewell is generally trustworthy, and as a critic usually fair. But in a work going over so much ground it would be unreasonable to expect perfect accuracy, and uniformly just estimates of the labors of all scientific men. Dr. Whewell's scientific philosophy naturally affects his ability as an historian and critic. In his Bridgewater Treatise, he indulged in a fling at mathematics, for which we have never wholly forgiven him; and in the present volume we see repeated evidence of his underestimate of the value of the sciences of Space and Time. He says, Vol. I. p. 600, that it was an "erroneous assumption" in Plato to hold mathematical truths as "Realities more real than the Phenomena." But to us it seems impossible to understand any work of Nature aright, except by taking this view of Plato. The study of natural science is deserving of the contempt which Samuel Johnson bestowed upon it, if it be not a study of the thoughts of the Divine Mind. And as phenomena are subject to laws of space and time as their essential condition, they are primarily a revelation of the mathematical thoughts of the Creator. Those mathematical ideas are, in Erigena's phrase, the created creators of all that can appear.