A vast amount of useful information is treasured up in these two national volumes. Agriculture, commerce and trade, the cultivation of cotton, education, the arts of design, banking, mining, steam, the fur-trade, etc., are subjects of interest everywhere, and the present writers seem to be specially competent for the task they have assumed. If the household library should possess such books more frequently, less ignorance would prevail on topics concerning which every American ought to be well-informed. Woful silence usually prevails when a foreigner asks for statistics on any point connected with our industrial progress, and very few take the trouble to get at facts which are easy enough to be had with a little painstaking. We are glad to see so much good material brought together as we find in these two well-filled volumes. _Electro-Physiology and Electro-Therapeutics: Showing the Rules and Methods for the Employment of Galvanism in Nervous Diseases_, etc. Second Edition, with Additions. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1861. At a time when the partition-wall between Jew and Gentile of the medical world is pretty thoroughly breached, if not thrown down, and quackery and imposture are tolerated as necessary evils, it is agreeable to meet with a real work of science, emanating from the labors of a regular physician, concerning the influences exerted by electricity on the human body, both in health and disease. Electricity is one of the great powers of Nature, pervading all matter, existing in all mineral, vegetable, and animal bodies, not only acting in the combinations of the elements and molecules, but also serving as a means for their separation from each other. This imponderable fluid or power, whatever it may be, whether one or two, or a polarization of one force into the states + and -, is one of the most active agencies known to man, and although not capable of being weighed in the balance, is not found wanting anywhere in Nature. It courses in great currents beneath our feet, in the solid rocks of the earth, penetrating to the very interior of the globe, while it also rushes through our atmosphere in lurid flashes, and startles us with the crash and roar of heaven's artillery. It gives magnetic polarity to the earth, and directs the needle by its influence; for magnetic attraction is only an effect of the earth's thermo-electricity, excited by the sun's rays acting in a continuous course. Both animal and vegetable life are dependent on electric forces for their development; and many of their functions, directly or indirectly, result from their agency. If this force controls to a great degree the living functions of our organs in their healthy action, it must be that it is concerned in those derangements and lesions which constitute disease and abnormal actions or disorders. It must have a remedial and the opposite effect, according as it is applied.