For writing such a work we do not think Dr. Draper perfectly qualified. For this we find in him no tokens of an intelligence sufficiently subtile, penetrating, and profound. He is, moreover, too heady and too well cased in his materialistic strait-waistcoat. Nevertheless, his book carries in it a certain large suggestion; it contains many excellent observations; its tone is unexceptionable; the style is firm and clear, though heavy and disfigured by such intolerable barbarisms as "commence to" walk, talk, or the like,--the use of the infinitive instead of the participle after _commence_. Dr. Draper is an able man, a scholar in science, a well-informed, studious gentleman in other provinces; but he tries to be a legislator in thought, and fails. _De l'Origine du Langage_. Par ERNEST RENAN, Membre de l'Institut. Quatrieme Edition, augmentee. Paris. It seems to be the law of French thought, that it shall never be exhaustive of any profound matter, and also that (Auguste Comte always excepted) it shall never be exhausting to the reader. German thought may be both; French is neither; English thought--but the English do not think, they dogmatize. Magnificent dogmatism it may be, but dogmatism. Exceptions of course, but these are equally exceptions to the characteristic spirit of the nation. M. Renan is thoroughly French. The power of coming after the great synthetic products of the human spirit and distributing them by analysis into special categories, eminent in his country, is pre-eminent in him. The facility at slipping over hard points, and at coming to unity of representation, partly by the solving force of an interior principle, and partly by ingenious accommodations, characteristic of French thought, characterizes his thinking in particular. That supremacy of the critical spirit in the man which secures to it the loyalty of all the faculties is alike peculiar to France among nations, and to this writer among Frenchmen. In Germany the imagination dominates, or at least contends with, the critical spirit; the French Ariel not only gives magic service to the critical Prospero, but seeks no emancipation, desires nothing better. Hence an admirable clearness and shapeliness in the criticism of France. Hence, also, in its best criticism a high degree of imaginative subtilty and penetration, without prejudice either to the dominion of common sense in the thought or to clearness in the statement. M. Renan's essay on "The Origin of Language" is typical of his quality. Treating of an abstruse, though enticing problem,--_almost_ profound, and that in comparison with the soundest and sincerest thinking of our time,--it is yet so clear and broad, its details are so perfectly held in solution by the thought, the thought itself moves with such ease, grace, and vigor, and in its style there is such crystal perspicuity and precision, that one must he proof against good thinking and excellent writing not to feel its charm.