University, and a competent corps of assistants at Cold Spring Harbor, L. I. The laboratory is housed in the New York State Fish Commission building, and is provided with every modern appliance for original investigation. Again, the department of psychology, after listening to a course of eight lectures by distinguished specialists on the salient features of the subject, is about to enter upon an extended investigation of the psychology of child life. And so it is with all of the departments. Each is doing something to add to the common stock of knowledge; while, by means, not of a disjointed arrangement of meetings and discussions, but of systematic courses of lectures, it is spreading broadcast before the people knowledge that is usually confined to college halls or learned societies. Besides the courses already mentioned, others have been given on the history of the English language, on English literature, on Constitutional law, on Dante, on sculpture, and on painting.

The great favor in which the Institute is held by the people of Brooklyn is shown by many significant facts. Its membership has increased from 70 in 1888 to 1700 in 1891. The number of general and departmental lectures and meetings has increased from 12 in 1888 to 230 in 1890, and 310 in 1891. Land to the extent of forty-five acres has been set apart by the city for the erection of suitable library, lecture, and museum buildings. The State Legislature has authorized the city to expend $350,000 for the erection of buildings, provided that the Institute shows that it is possessed of available funds to the extent of $200,000-a sum which is now practically in hand. The Institute, through its unique organization—an organization largely due to its director, Professor Franklin W. Hooper-is doing much for the cause of education. When its buildings are erected, it will have a plant unsurpassed in this country either for the conduct of original research, or for the dissemination of knowledge.

Of an entirely different character is Pratt Institute. The Brooklyn Institute provides educational opportunities for those who desire to employ their leisure time in supplementing their school or college education along the lines of literature, science, and art; Pratt Institute is itself a school-a school of applied science and technical art. The Brooklyn Institute is

democratic in the sense that it is controlled by its members; Pratt Institute is also democratic, yet it is controlled, not by its students, but by regulations laid down by its founder, Mr. Charles Pratt. Mr. Pratt, whose recent death has aroused a lively sense of gratitude for his benefactions to the cause of education, was a man of marked characteristics. Starting in life with nothing save his own abilities and character, he had achieved wealth and conquered a high social position. With very few educational advantages in youth, he had made himself, in the best sense of the word, an educated man. "He was an educated man," has said one of his admirers, "in distinction from the scholar, and he had been for the most part his own teacher. Some of the forms of culture he may have lacked because of his early disadvantages, but if education's finest result is the despotic control of one's faculties for practical ends, then he was an educated man." Thus it came about that he had the means to carry on single-handed a great educational work, the desire to undertake it, and the wisdom and ability to accomplish his object. Neither his own early struggles, nor the views of life attained in maturer years, had made him averse to literary training. His rich gifts to literary institutions, and the fact that he gave each of his sons a college education as a preparation for commercial avocations, are sufficient proof that he felt and acknowledged the power and necessity of literary and scientific training.

But it is the great glory of his life that in a city in which nothing had been done to provide manual training, in an environment in which the trend of educational thought was wholly opposed to that method of education, in advance of the philosophers and more clearly than the professional educators, he saw that the conditions of modern life demand that the hand and eye shall be trained as well as the memory, the executive faculty as well as the reasoning powers. He had meditated on these problems and reached his conclusions years before he took any definite step to put them into execution. Finding that he could not formulate a clear and comprehensive plan without a concrete object, he set about erecting the present buildings. and engaged two instructors in drawing. This was the beginning. The Institute was opened October 17, 1887, with twelve pupils in drawing. This year three thousand students have been enrolled in the seven different departments.

Roughly speaking, there are three main divisions in the work

of Pratt Institute. First, industrial work, in which 90 per cent. of all the students are engaged, and which is carried on in special and professional lines for the purpose of training in handicraft, and includes nearly all trades, from millinery and dressmaking to brick-laying and plumbing; second, Normal work in three departments, cooking, art, and vocal music,-in which teachers are trained; third, a manual training high school, in which it is sought to give the student an ideal all-round education. These three lines of work are the fruit of Mr. Pratt's own planning. All the wisdom gathered in a busy life was brought to bear in the development of the institution. Other plans he did not live to accomplish, but they will doubtless be carried out by his sons. In this school he has left not only a worthy monument of himself but an example which other men who have the requisite means and the philanthropic disposition would do well to imitate.

VIII.

REVIEWS.

A Sketch of The Philosophy of American Literature.-By GREENOUGH WHITE, A. M. Boston: Ginn & Company, 1891, pp. iv, 66.

This little book-it is, in fact, only a pamphlet-is an attempt to suggest, as far as may be done in so narrow limits, the conditions, social, political, ethical, out of which American literature has grown; and to prove thereby that that literature has an independent and genuinely national character. There is no better sketch of our literature in so brief compass. Mr. White, however, seems most successful in his discussion of the earlier periods of our literary history; his treatment becomes less satisfactory just as he reaches the time when the literature begins to grow interesting. The half-century from 1830 to 1880, the period of intellectual and moral ferment which gave rise to the transcendentalist movement, the anti-slavery movement, and varied schemes of social and economic reform, this was the period when, for the first time, our national life seemed able to express itself in a vigorous and genuine school of literature. But Mr. White hardly succeeds in analyzing this movement clearly into its various elements or in showing how they got embodied in literature. This failure is due in great measure to the unfortunate limitation of his work which "excludes all mention of living authors." It is evidently impossible to give adequate illustrations of this first important period of our literature without reference to Lowell, or Whittier, or Holmes.

The truth is that the history of our literature before the beginning of this century may be written very much after the fashion of the chapter on the snakes in Ireland-there wasn't any literature. There were great men on this side the watermen the peers of any in Europe-there were great things doing here; but there was no great literature or writing. The ability of the country did not express itself in letters. Bradford, Ward, the Mathers, Byles, Barlow, Trumbull, these were not great men, and the literature of the English language would hardly be the poorer if every line of their writings were lost; while the men who were really great, even though they

may have left written record of their thought,-like Edwards, Franklin, Jefferson,-do not hold their fame by virtue of literary gift or work. The philosophic historian of American literature before 1800 has, therefore, little left to do save to account for this sterility. And this is not difficult. The causes of our literary barrenness are on the surface. Mr. White has stated them very well. The country was sparsely settled; there were few readers; there were no libraries, no means for the frequent and easy interchange of ideas; no leisure, no possibility of literary atmosphere or opportunity. Nor were the early colonists men who, in any circumstances, would have written great books. In the southern colonies they were largely drawn from the most shifting and lawless classes in England. The New England settlers were, it is true, exceptionally upright men; yet it must be admitted that the Puritan type of character, at all events the Massachusetts phase of it, was not a type of character from which literary production could be expected. To the English Puritan, it is true, indeed, the literary historian has often been unjust. We should remember that our great and only epic was written by a Puritan, and the Puritan type of character has now and then produced very great work since that day; Thomas Carlyle, for instance, was essentially a Puritan-minus the Westminster Confession. But the New England Puritan was narrowed by isolation, hardened by persecution, and by a constant sense of his own militant attitude toward the world. He had little humanity; and without humanity literature is impossible.

Nor was there any noteworthy development of literature here during the eighteenth century. Mr. White, indeed, speaks of the "magnificent cycle that extends from early in the eighteenth century to about the close of the second war with England"; but it is a very meager array of literary names that he can find to set in that cycle. In that period Americans were developing political ideas more wisely and rapidly than any other people on earth. The very conditions of their existence were a lesson in the nature and limitations of self-government. Edmund Burke early noticed that they were a nation of lawyers, and that the books they read were largely legal and political. But the literary taste and gift were not developed. The great revolutionary movement produced no poet, no historian, and hardly a single piece of pure literature above the fourth order of merit. It did produce