philosophical economists in the absence of pocket-money. They believe in teaching Young America to read and write the English language, confident that the Western mind will plough its way to a wisdom which shall overtop the learned folly of a thousand universities. The fact is, this clique is no faithful representative of the nobler side of Germany. To the real philosophy, the matchless criticism, the varied scholarship, the music, the theology, of the German mind, the West will make all due acknowledgment when its day comes. It will absorb as much of the charming geniality and catholic kindliness of its social life as can be blended. with our own. But for this lager-beer brigade of atheistic anarchists it has only the regard of an express train, that thunders through a drove of mad bulls, leaving a few spots on the track to illustrate the result of an actual measurement of social forces.

Up to the present day, the Western character, thus forming from manifold combinations of the richest elements in the world, has been completely developed only in industry, politics, war, and the beginning of the people's school, church, and social life. The vast majority of large-minded men- the men who, in older communities, would be scholars, divines, statesmen, literati—are engrossed in business. Business in the West is nothing less than the shaping of a new empire into a fit area for the experiment of the largest civilization yet seen upon the earth. In politics, the broad foundations of mighty commonwealths are being laid, in which humanity can expand into a true American manhood and womanhood. The people's common-school will finally absorb all other forms of education, and culminate, as in Michigan, in free universities, which can command the largest culture of the age for every child. In war, it has made one demonstration which has written a new chapter in human history, and turned the eyes of the world on the people beyond the Alleghanies. But, beyond this, the Western character has not been fully developed. Its day for literature and art has not appeared. Its social life is the broadest and most genial in the world, but still fluctuating

and crude, with great sloughs of coarseness and sensuality; and it doth not yet appear what it will finally become. Its organized religion represents its social far more than its religious life. But all things come in their order: "first the natural, afterward that which is spiritual;" and our children will see the West we only behold in vision, and recognize in it the most characteristic American life, and the broadest and highest organization into human affairs of the American Declaration of Independence and the Saviour's Golden Rule.

ART. II.-GEOGRAPHY OF PALESTINE.

The Comparative Geography of Palestine and the Sinaitic Peninsula. By CARL RITTER. Translated and adapted to the use of Biblical Students. By WILLIAM L. GAGE. 4 vols., 8vo. pp. xiv., 451, 418, 396, 410. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1866.

FOUR solid octavos upon the Lands of the Bible, attractive to the eye by the bright color of their covers, by their luxury of paper and type, by the name of their author, and by the charm of their subject, which, worn as it is, never fairly becomes wearisome to a student of the Bible! Shall we not find in these the last word concerning the sacred soil, and the wise and final decision of the numerous disputed questions? Will not this work of the acknowledged master in geographical science, the great organizer of the chaos of voyages, journals, and letters in all tongues, - will not this work bring an authority which we may implicitly trust, a verdict which cannot be set aside? That expectation is not realized. These full volumes, interesting as they are, settle hardly any important Biblical question. They give the best literature of the subject; but they leave readers to judge for themselves among the conflicting accounts and opinions. We are left more uncertain than ever, after the discussion of Ritter, whether the Serbal of Lepsius may not be the Sinai of the Exodus, and the traditional claim of the Mount of Moses be

discredited. The place of Golgotha is still undetermined. We are at liberty still to find a site for Cana in Galilee, and to conjecture the place of Capernaum by the seaside. Elijah's abode is not yet identified; and even the discussion of the vexed questions of Tarshish and Ophir, exhaustive as this seems, does not give full satisfaction. The evidence for India preponderates, but not enough to exclude reasonable doubt.

The work of Ritter is rather the material for a geography of the holy lands, than a systematic treatise. It brings together the accounts of the best writers, ancient and modern, but does not fuse them into a scientific and positive statement. We learn what Greek and Hebrew, Arab and Christian, have said about the sites and the legends; but we have not a regular work of a new writer, built solidly and squarely from this foundation of conglomerate. And, in addition to this intrinsic defect of the work, there are several incidental defects in the translation which is here given. It is not a translation of the full work, but is abridged by the translator; and we are not satisfactorily informed on what principles the omitted matter has been left out. Neither the author nor the translator seems to have visited any of the regions which they describe; the knowledge which they have of the sacred lands is all at second-hand, — from reading, and not from journeying. Neither of them, too, is acquainted with the Arabic language, an accomplishment indispensable in the thorough treatment of Arabian themes. There are no maps to illustrate the geographical details; and in these studies, for all but the fewest readers, accurate maps are essential to comfortable study. There are perpetual references in the text to statements and descriptions elsewhere given and in other works. And, as the original work was published fifteen years ago, no account is taken of the numerous important books which have appeared in the interval, except in the slight and frequently irrelevant notes of the translator. In the account of Jerusalem, for instance, hardly any use is made of the investigations and discoveries of Barclay, in the streets, caves, and water-courses, which he has so patiently explored.

Among those whom the translator includes as "too well known to the reader to require specification," is Sepp; yet neither the text nor the notes of these volumes show any actual acquaintance with the discussions of Sepp: indeed, it does not appear that the editor of these volumes has ever read one chapter of the voluminous and original work which he describes as so "well known." The same thing may be said of his acquaintance with numerous other works noted in his catalogue. There are also occasional annoying typographical blunders, which show carelessness of proof-reading.

But, with all these incidental defects, and with the original composite structure of the work, the thanks of Biblical students are due to the industrious editor of these volumes, for giving them, in such excellent, idiomatic English, a work of so much interest and value, a work which condenses so well the substance of a Palestinian library. No matter if it does not settle the disputed questions: it does what is better, in bringing before us the land in its various aspects of winter and summer, sunshine and shade, beauty and ruin. With no attempt at fine writing or picture-painting, it brings before us a gallery of pictures, a series of panoramic views, more vivid and life-like than the fancies of such writers as De Saulcy, Lamartine, and Chateaubriand. Ritter makes the dry narrative of some writers that he quotes graphic, and tones down the imagination of other writers. If he does not interpret all the wonders and solve all the puzzles of Palestine and the Peninsula, he gives the land its proper relief and proportion before the eye; shows how the mountains stand, how the plains lie, and what hides in the caverns; shows the rocks and the men as they are now, and as they have been for thousands of years. The combinations of Ritter leave a picturesque effect, quite as real as the descriptions of Stanley; and he rounds off into graceful shape the accurate measurements of Robinson, who is his highest authority and his most trusted guide. The American scholar goes in the centre and at the head of that group of scholars and observers which the reader follows all through these volumes. When Ritter differs from Robinson, he apologizes for his temerity.

One would think, in the abundance of books which have been written about the Holy Land, by travellers, by naturalists, by pilgrims; by men of every name, faith, and nation; credulous and sceptical, prosaic plodders and poetic dreamers, that the whole territory, shore and plain, hill and hollow, must have been described, leaving no foot of ground neglected. Yet this careful summary of the German geographer shows us the larger half of Palestine still waiting to be interpreted, a terra incognita, within twenty miles of the sea, as real as the unknown region of inland Africa. Here is a country not larger than New Hampshire, and not unlike New Hampshire in its general shape and some of its physical characteristics, which, with its history of four thousand years, and all that has been written about it, cannot be pictured on a chart so surely as the State of yesterday. To read the four hundred works and more that have been written on Palestine in the last fifteen years, would take four years of close application; yet, at the end, one would not have gone over half of the land. And even of what seems to be explored, comparatively little is really told or known. Almost every one who has "walked about Zion," and uttered his impressions of the ancient city of God, adds his regret that his view has been so imperfect, and that he has seen and learned so little. Not one in all the books about Jerusalem, not all of them together, perfectly tell what is to be seen above ground there, much less what excavations anywhere would reveal. With all that has been written about the aqueducts and pools and cisterns, it is still uncertain how water was supplied to Solomon's temple, and where the water goes to that comes by the aqueduct After all the descriptions, a mystery hangs over the sacred land, even where it seems best known, as heavy and as dense as the mist upon the mountains of Moab and the Sea of Sodom. Neither the legends of piety nor the conclusions of science can dissolve that mystery.

now.

It seems a disgraceful confession, after so much has been written about Palestine, so much money spent in travel there, that so little should be accurately known about it; that hundreds of travellers should go, one after another, along these