Barry & Patten gave the library a copy of Murphy's Arabian Antiquities, in two volumes, of which two copies only are said to exist in the United States, and which was originally furnished to subscribers at one hundred guineas each. Between 1868 and 1878 the Institute purchased a set of the transac tions of the Royal Philosophical Society of Great Britain. The library also contains full sets of Curtis's Botanical Magazine, Annales des Mines, Pagendorff Annalen—all full sets, besides such sets as Engineering, Engineer, Notes and Queries, Mechanics' Magazine, Builder, London Art Journal, and a large number of very valuable and rare books of reference upon subjects relating to the mechanic arts, invention, travel and history.

The invaluable set of British Patent Office Reports were secured after two applications and refusals-but a third application, made by Mr. A. S. Hallidie, then President of the Institute, unknown to the directory or members because considered almost hopeless, was successful. These reports occupy the greater portion of a large room in the Institute Building. The Mechanics' Institute by this means became the official depository of the British Patent Office Reports, and it has also succeeded in becoming the official depository of the United States Patent Reports, as well as of the Reports of Victoria and New South Wales, Australia.

The Institute library is remarkably rich in books of reference pertaining to the arts and sciences, and in this particular excels any other library on the coast, and probably any library of its size and age in the United States.

The only bequest ever made to the library was that of ten thousand dollars from James Lick, for scientific books. It has been paid over by the Lick Trustees, but has not yet been spent.

In the efficiency and devotion of the of ficers of the Institute-all business men of the highest standing-the secret of its success can be discovered. Each successive board has been composed of worthy and able citizens, and it would be impossible to single out any for praise. A. S. Hallidie's long term of extraordinarily devoted and efficient service was succeeded by Irving M. Scott's

energetic management (during 1878 and 1879); while in 1880, P. B. Cornwall assumed office, and the great growth of the Institute in recent years is largely due to his admirable tact, and to the business ability of himself and his efficient boards of directors. The present board of the Institute is composed of the following business men of the city, many of whom have been trustees of the Institute for many years: P. B. Cornwall, President; David Kerr, Vice-President; J. A. Bauer, Treasurer; W. P. Stout, Secretary; James Spiers, Corresponding Secretary; C. Waterhouse, D. A. Macdonald, George Spaulding, C. F. Bassett, J. R. Wilcox, Geo. H. Hopps, Byron Jackson, J. J. Mahoney, John Mallon, Trustees; J. H. Culver, Assistant Secretary; J. H. Gilmore, Superintendent.

Mr. Horace Wilson has been chief librarian since 1878, and the popularity of the library is largely due to his judicious choice and arrangement of books.

The Institute has been a part of the history of the State ever since its small beginnings. Leading men, ignoring sect and party, have laid its foundations and built its walls. Some of the best men of the coast have delivered its annual addresses, and its bound volumes of reports contain an immense mass of useful information relating to the arts and sciences, and to the industrial and agricultural growth of California. Its free evening classes in mechanical drawing, freehand and perspective, geometry and trigonometry, and Spanish, are designed to lead to the final establishment of a polytechnic school of arts. Some day there will be room for designs, models, collections of woods and minerals, classes in wood-carving, metal work, and various branches of higher industrial art. We can safely leave the future of the Institute in the hands of the business men of San Francisco. It has depended on no millionaire's endowment or State gifts; it has not entered politics; its officers (except the librarians and the assistant secretary) serve without salary. It deserves twice its present membership, and a new library building with shelf room for one hundred thousand volumes.

7. H. Culver.

OUTSIDE of translations, there are perhaps among recent novels a smaller number than usual worthy of attention. Among those of the present quarter, In the Old Palazzo,1 The Crack of Doom, Pomegranate Seed, Like Lucifer, and Her Own Doing," have all a family resem. blance--though the last named is only a novelette, in the Harper's Handy Series, while the others are Franklin Square issues, and of regulation length. The Crack of Doom has some originality and a good deal of brightness; and had the author been able to cut away more completely from the conventionalities of the English society novel, he might have produced a really noteworthy book. The story is ingenious, the thread on which it hangs-viz., the approach of a comet to the earth-original, and the intrigues with stock-market, love, and society, of an adventurer, personating an imaginary Austrian count, are raised to the dignity of a psychological study by the happy thought of developing imposture into monomania. The conversations among scientific and literary people are real and bright—such talk as does actually go on among them, instead of such as does duty for it in most novels; indeed, the conversation is enough above the level of the book to cause surprise. Bits, too, occur of neat observations and phrase, such as: "Father and daughter went on for a little, catching at each other's words and ideas in that pleasant domestic vein in which a little wit is made to go a long way by a mutual disposition to be pleased with small profits, if the returns are quick." The story is, however, padded with stock characters, especially women, who talk and 1 In the Old Palazzo. By Gertrude Ford. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1886.

2 The Crack of Doom. By William Minto. New York: Harper & Bros. 1886.

act unreally enough. The other four novels mentioned are altogether, as The Crack of Doom is in part, commonplace. Pomegranate Seed makes some pretense to deal in Polish and Nihilist plotters and Irish land leaguers, but obviously from the merest hearsay, and only to supply incident; the others have no individual qualities, but are free from serious deficiencies in intelligence or good taste.

Foreordained and A Den of Thieves are scarcely properly classed as fiction at all, the one being a tract upon proper preparation for maternity-quite minute in its directions, and by no means without good sense; and the other a tract upon temperance reform, differing from a typical Sunday school book only by a freer admission of love affairs. The Death of Hewfik Pasha is not so absolutely without any literary value as these, but it has very little. It is an old-fashioned romance of sensational love and adventure, but it is not ill-bred, and is written in a straightforward, somewhat stilted, but not disagreeable style, free from solecisms-except the somewhat surprising statement that the hero was guarded by "a drawn scabbard."

Dr. William Hammond persists in the field of fiction, and has lately published, in conjunction with Clara Lanza, a collection of short stories, devoted to the eccentric and morbid. They are not absolute failures, like the novels of the same author, but neither are they really successful. They are readable, and each one, as the reader comes to it, seems about to be entertaining and in

• Foreordained: A Story of Heredity. New York: Fowler & Wells Co. 1886. For sale in San Francisco by Samuel Carson & Co.

7 A Den of Thieves, or The Lay Reader of St. Mark's. By Mary Cruger. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. 1886. 8 The Death of Hewfik Pasha. New York: Funk & Wagnalls. 1886. For sale in San Francisco by Phillips & Hunt.

9 Tales of Eccentric Life. By William A. Hammond and Clara Lanza. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1886. For sale in San Francisco by William Doxey.

genious; but when read proves disappointing, either trivial or labored. They are artificially whimsical, rather than ingenious. Still, when so great a number of short stories is continually published by periodicals, and-human invention being limited-so much monotony prevails among these, it is something to achieve novelty in one, even though it be not of high order.

The Story of Don Miff1 is a somewhat exasperating novel, which it has pleased the author to construct after a fashion of his own, and a tedious and confusing fashion. It consists chiefly of digressions deliberate digressions, most of them humorously intended digressions within digressions, interludes, in which the fictitious author develops his own personality or chaffs with the other characters of the story, comments on the matter or manner of the book, outbursts of political opinion. All this, as we have implied, is not unconsciously done, but is the deliberate plan upon which the story is constructed, something as Dr. Holmes weaves a thread of narrative in with his breakfast-table reflections and we need hardly say that Dr. Holmes is not a safe model for most writers to follow. Mr. Dabney is a devoted Virginian, and explains, in several of his digressions, that his chief object in the story is to describe the old Virginian life before the war, to which he looks back with longing and affection while conceding that it stood on an impossible foundation, and was bound to pass away sooner or later. The trait in the Virginian society of those days which he desires most strongly to bring out, is its union of aristocratic refinement with perfect unconventionality; and one of the young ladies is avowedly a type designed to show how "Virginia girls could be gay without being indiscreet, joyous, yet not loud, unconventional, yet full of real dignity." That the wild romps and free drinking of the men, the giggling, chaffing, and incessant talk of lovers among the girls, will produce 1 The Story of Don Miff, as told by his friend, John Bouche Whacker. A Symphony of Life. Edited by Virginius Dabney. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Company. 1886. For sale in San Francisco by Joseph A. Hoffman.

the intended pleasant impression upon any reader who has not himself affectionate memories connected with old Virginia, is highly improbable. The most unpleasant trait in the book is the jocose view of love and marriage, which are regarded as inexhaustible subjects for drollery, from teasing a child of four about "her sweetheart" upward. This is, of course, a trait not peculiar to Don Miff, nor in any way novel; but the society in which it is most familiar nowadays, is that of an inferior order. The romps, the jests, the love-making, of Don Miff, based upon this jocose view, can be found scarcely caricatured below stairs many an evening when the family above stairs is indulgent or absent. It is a perplexing thing in Southern novels that this secondrate quality coëxists with so much refinement and intelligence. Don Miff is abundantly sprinkled with these qualities throughout, and with a very neat humor, sufficiently in contrast with his humor when girls or courtship are in question. One quotation gives a very fair idea of the best manner of the book:

It was, indeed, . . . . the settled conviction of the Protestants of Virginia at that day, that all Catholics were as surely destined to the bottomless pit as the very heathen who had never so much as heard a whisper of the glad tidings. (My Catholic friends often complained to me of this bigotry. For my part, I hardly knew whether to laugh or to weep, when I remembered that they had made precisely the same arrangements for my Protestant acquaintance.)

Cut: A Story of West Point is by the author of "A Model Wife" already reviewed in the OVERLAND. It is perhaps a better book than its predecessor, but that is not saying a great deal. It is a rather unpleasant story, with the sentimental moral that it is a man's duty to ruin his whole life, rather than act counter to a conscientious scruple of his grandmother, which his own conscience does

not second. The contradiction in terms of

a

West Point cadet promising not to fight, makes the motive still more inadequate to the behavior. There is spirit and

2 Cut: A Story of West Point. By J. I. Cervus, Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. 1886. For sale in San Francisco by Jos. A. Hoffmann.

reality, however, in the descriptions of West Point cadet life, and the rapid sketch of war experiences and reunions of old class mates after the war is attractive and interesting.

Mrs. Helen Campbell, whose "Mrs. Herndon's Income" was lately reviewed by the OVERLAND, gives the results of another and somewhat different research into the needs of the poor, in Miss Melinda's Opportunity— a short, bright story, to show how shop-girls can set up coöperative housekeeping, and how likely they will be to fall in with rich old ladies, anxious to find out what to do with their money, to help them. We fear the part about the rich old lady will not come true, but it helps out the story as a story, and does not injure it as a tract, for the coöperative housekeeping would have succeeded without help-did succeed without help, in fact, for the rich old lady's money went to extending the experiment, not to helping the pioneers in it.

Indeed, her part of the story is also a tract, addressed to a different class-to the rich, to point out the admirable field for beneficence in that class which Stewart so colossally failed to benefit, through profound ignorance of their needs. That sensible working women want no charity, and know better than anyone else what their own needs are, and that they cannot be helped by the wholesale, but in small numbers and through personal acquaintance, are points Mrs. Campbell tries especially to bring out--emphasizing them by making the old lady so childlike and indecisive that she is wax in the hands of the girls themselves, when it comes to planning the practical means of making her money useful. But whether the old lady appears or not, it remains true that the girls can get on without her; that the plan outlined by Mrs. Campbell, by which the right sort of working girls can get some degree of home privacy, home comfort, and home spirit, without more cost than in the dreary boarding houses, and with perfect independence, is an entirely practicable one.

The great difficulty, as in all other plans for bettering people's condition, is, that the majority of working girls, like the majority of every other class, are not the right sort to do these things. Modest, energetic, sensible girls, appreciative of pretty homes and of Emerson and Ruskin, handy and capable, do not stand behind every counter. Mrs. Campbell has, indeed, not taken her pioneers in the experiment from behind the counter, but from somewhat more exclusive positions-book-keeping, telegraphing, etc.

Two American novels, decidedly of the better class, are Not in the Prospectus and Justina. The first one of these is in Houghton, Mifflin & Co's paper-covered summer series; the other in the No Name seriesboth series that have selected a high average of fiction.

Not in the Prospectus has no especial mission, but is simply a story; and a pretty and refined one-unless it be considered a mission to warn the unwary against the great European tourist excursions. The experiences of the tourist party are doubtless a little caricatured, and Mr. Messer likewise; but on the whole, the lively account of both is doubtless a warning well worth heeding by the fastidious. Fustina has a moral. It is a study of that delicate, but evidently attractive, question to the pens of women— the extent to which the obligation of marriage is binding, on account of the legal tie, when for any reason the moral claim of husband or wife has ceased to exist. Pos. sibly it was the experience of Mr. Lewes and George Eliot, and the solution of the difficulty chosen by them, that has drawn the attention of novelists in this direction. Miss Woolson's latest novel turns on this question-What must lovers do when separated by a marriage tie that has no sacredness outside of its legal force?—and decides that it is their duty to absolutely renounce each other; decides, many will think, most

2 Not in the Prospectus. By Parke Danforth. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1886. For sale in San Francisco by Chilion Beach.

8 Justina. No Name series. Boston: Roberts Bros. 1886.

rightly. Others will think that a woman's duty, not only to herself and her lover, but to society, demands that where the way is perfectly open, through just divorce, she should exchange the false form of marriage for true marriage. The author of Fustina, with some daring, yet with perfect purity, takes it as the straightforward and common sense view, that where a third person stands legally between the hands of lovers, yet for any reason has forfeited the right to interpose between their hearts, the situation should be accepted just as it stands-the legal barrier respected, the freedom for avowed friendship and affection taken. Justina and Rolfe "lived it out" to the end as avowed lovers, setting no limits to their exchange of affection, and accepting the restrictions of ordinary friendship in their intercourse. The relation is noble, and is told with dignity and nobility in the story. Whether it would be in life wise or practicable, is another thing. It involves a secrecy, or even duplicity, hurtful to dignity and confusing to the moral sense; it might be carried out, with even some degree of happiness, by the woman, but it is questionable whether the situation would be tolerable to the man. Passing by this main point, we must add that the social background of the study is very well drawn, refined and intelligent. The life and manners of wealthy and somewhat cosmopolitan people of intellect and station, in an aristocratic New England village, the tranquil charm of the place, the serenity and sweetness of manners, the influences that produce, as their final and typical result, such a "nice girl" as Mary Beverly - all these are well caught.

Constance of Acadia is the first of a series of historical romances, which are to describe old colonial life in America. Constance was the Huguenot wife of Charles La Tour, lord-lieutenant of Acadia, about the middle of the seventeenth century. The design of this able and high-minded woman was to make Acadia a Huguenot colony, in

1 Constance of Acadia. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1886. For sale in San Francisco by Strickland & Pier

son.

order to build up a French Protestant power, based on something such principles as those of New England, which might, in time, become a nation. She is a striking and beautiful figure, but otherwise we cannot call the book a success as a novel. It is in that capacity confused and dim, and quite without any narrative flow. Regarded as a historical study, it is interesting and suggestive; but to appreciate it as such would require a considerable knowledge of Acadian colonial history, and only a specialist in that history could properly criticize it. So thoroughly are the lines of fact and fiction confused, that it is quite impossible for the reader who is not a specialist, to know whether he is being solemnly mocked with make-believe historic notes, the story counterfeiting history with an air more innocent than Mr. Hale's in his realistic sketches, or whether he is reading what is really a history, to which a thin film of fiction has been added. To many readers, certainly, the interest of the book is thus lost; it may affect others differently, and there is much intelligence, insight, humor, and good writing in it.

Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson has lately published two romances, Prince Ottos and Kidnapped. They are pure romances, intended only to excite and entertain—and yet about Prince Otto a sort of moral clings, in the miseries of both Prince and Princess on their throne with discord, and their happiness, as commoners, with love. It is, take it all in all, a rather tender and romantic tale; and take it in detail, a sprightly and entertainingly humorous one. Nothing could be more demurely amusing than situation after situation. The encounters between the English tourist and the Prince and Princess are especially good. The contents of Kidnapped are well enough foreshadowed by the subtitle: "Being memoirs of the adventures of David Balfour in the year 1751; how he was Kidnapped and cast away: his sufferings in

2 Prince Otto. A Romance. By Robert Louis Stevenson. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1886. For sale in San Francisco by Strickland & Pierson.

3 Kidnapped. By Robert Louis Stevenson. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1886.