Current Literature [pp. 381-392]

CURRENT LITERATURE.
ed by a private company. The various mat ters treated of are illustrated with cuts de scriptive of mountain scenery, with numer ous maps, sections of mines, mineral belts, and
geological formations, and with topographical views of the country traversed, plans of
ditches and reservoirs, tabular exhibits, etc.
This work, apart from the professional excellence of the service performed, is marked
by a good deal of literary merit. The style
is simple, terse, and lucid; technical and
scientific terms and modes of expression,
though often new, are always used with propriety, and there is little doubt that the book
will be extensively read outside the mining
public for whose enlightenment it is more especially intended. In the mountain meadows and stately forests, in the summer snowfields, in the tracks of the glaciers, in the
lake-beds and lofty basins scooped out by
these slow-moving masses of ice in the volcanic flows and ancient craters, in the uplifted peaks and the deep fissured chasms with
their fillings, in the Pliocene rivers, buried
long ages ago, and in the innumerable other
grand and curious objects, so fairly described
by the author, the general reader will find
much to interest him.
Mr. Bowman was one of Professor Whitney's most efficient aids on the State Geological Survey, having been one of the few
that remained in that thankless and ill-requited service until the last. In this work we
have the first geological section of the Sierra
Nevada ever published with special reference
to the veins inclosed in the auriferous slate
formation; these metalliferous belts having
never before been so thoroughly examined,
nor their importance as future sources of
wealth so fully established, as has been here
done.
A complete map of E1 Dorado County,
including strips of the country adjacent, forms
a valuable appendage to this volume. This
also was prepared by Mr. Bowman, much of
it from original data, and exhibits, in addition to the topographic features, stratigraphic
sections of the region covered by it. Having
been projected on a large scale, the geography of the district embraced within the limits of this map is displayed with much detail, the smaller gulches and streams, the
lower ridges and the minutest lakes, as well
as the higher mountains, and the larger rivers
and bodies of water, having been accurately
laid down upon it.
THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY. By Lord Neaves,
one of the Senators of the College of Jus tice in Scotland. Philadelphia: J. B. Lip pincott & Co.
THE READING CLUB AND HANDY SPEAK ER. Edited by George M. Baker (No. I).
Boston: Lee & Shepard; New York, Lee,
Shepard & Dillingham.
THE COLUMBIAN SPEAKER. Selected and
adapted by Loomis J. Campbell and Oren
Root, Jr. Boston: Lee & Shepard; New
York: Lee, Shepard & Dillingham.
These three collections are fairly good in
their several ways. Anything Greek will
probably throw a sufficient number of minds
into a state of receptive, almost religious awe;
the more especially as "the collection, or
rather the collections, of small poems known
as the Greek'Anthology,' have long been
an object of great interest to scholars."
"Much studied and repeatedly edited," we
hope, nevertheless, that such epigrams as the
following, even though "said to be by Plato," may not be "often imitated "-subject,
the statue of a frog:
The servant of the Nymphs, who loves the showers,
The minstrel moist, who lurks in watery bowers,
A frog, in bronze, a wayfarer here laid,
Whose burning thirst was quenched by welcome aid.
By the hoarse monitor's amphibious tone
A hidden spring was to the wanderer shown;
He followed, nor forsook the guiding sound,
Till the much-wished-for draught he grateful found."
This is rather a poor specimen of the short
Greek poems and epigrams; yet, after all,
had Greece produced nothing better than
this Anthology, her claim to poetic fame
would be rather easily disposed of by other
countries. In epigram, forced antithesis, and
petty trifles of wit, the average Parisian can
distance Homer or'Eschylus any day; and
it is a good sound maxim that advises the
cobbler to stick to his last.
In the Reading Club and in the Columbian
Speaker, Mr. Baker and Messrs. Campbell
and Root have fairly attained their respective
ends, and produced small volumes of good
selections-Mr. Baker's being much the better of the two. Anything that introduces,
even at second hand, the greater writers to
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