price and quality, an Inferno of alimentation in which I wonder that Doré never dipped.

Having dined comfortably at Simpson's some Saturday afternoon, let the American visitor to London go up Tottenham Court Road about 9 P. M., (it may be changed now or “moved on "

to some other suburb of the Inferno), and smoke his cigar in the glare of lights and blare of brazen throats over the marketing of the poor, and then (remembering that this is not the cheapest in London, for to some no stranger ought to venture) make his comfortable estimate of John Bull at feed. W. J. Stillman.

The Life and Times of David Zeisberger, the Western Pioneer and Apostle of the Indians. By EDMUND DE SCHWEINITZ. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co.

IN an article entitled "Gnadenhütten,” which was printed in the Atlantic for Janu ary, 1869, the principal facts of the noble career here so fully described were sketched, and the present work, which we heartily welcome, was mentioned as in preparation. It has all the value which we then predicted for it, and is certainly "a most important contribution to American history in a department hitherto neglected by students, and almost an unknown land to the mere general reader"; it is something more than this, and is to be praised, not only for the thorough research and conscientious industry shown in it, but for the enlightened spirit in which it is written, and the candid manner in which Zeisberger's labors are considered. The author, who is now a bishop of the Moravian Church, yields to none probably in zeal for his ancient faith, and pride in its apostles; but as to the practical result of the Moravian mission to our Indians, no one could be more courageously and unsparingly outspoken. This mission resulted at Gnadenhütten and elsewhere in the conversion and civilization of a limited number of Indians, who, as long as they were isolated from the influences of the border, maintained themselves in Christian communities, but who disappeared before the advancing whites almost as quickly as their wild heathen brethren. Of all the stations established among the Indians by the Moravians, during the last century and a half, but three are now left, one in Canada, another in Kansas, and another in the Cherokee country. "The

time may not be far distant,” says our author, "when even these will disappear, and nothing remain of the Moravian mission among the North American Indians, as nothing remains of the work of the Jesuit fathers, except its wonderful history, to teach future generations zeal for God and faithfulness unto death." He contrasts the failure of this mission with the success of the Moravian missions to other heathen, and attributes it to the vastly more indocile character of our aborigines, as well as the more adverse circumstances; and a less generous and patient historian would perhaps have inferred from his facts that the Indians were not worth the sublime sacrifices made for them. But neither the Moravians nor the Jesuits would admit this, and every one else should be loath to do so. It is not a justifiable interpretation of Bishop de Schweinitz's language even where he deals most frankly with the subject, and paints the Indians in a spirit which is very far from ideal or romantic. His colors are from Zeisberger's own records, now for the first time used; but we do not know that they are darker than those of other observers of Indian life, though they are certainly not those of the novelist : :

"Morally considered, they belonged to the most ordinary and the vilest of savages. Upon this point Zeisberger's testimony is as clear as it must be deemed conclusive. He loved the Indians. He spent his life in doing them good. It is impossible to suppose that he would have depicted their character in darker colors than truth warranted. And yet, instead of clothing it with those illustrious features which other writers have portrayed, he represents it as low and detestable. Lying, cheating, and

theft were universal. The marriage relation was of the lowest kind. Husbands forsook their wives whenever they pleased. To grow weary of a woman was a sufficient cause of desertion. Fornication and adultery prevailed. The ordinary state of a majority of both sexes was unchastity. Other vices, of the most abominable kind, were common. The false estimate which has been made of the aborigines of the last century arose from their aptitude to dissemble and their eagerness for praise. Zeisberger has laid this bare by a single pithy sentence. 'They love to be deemed honest and good,' he writes, even when detected in the worst of villanies.' In almost every respect, therefore, they were double-faced and doublehearted; one character they assumed for show, the other was theirs in reality."

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Bishop de Schweinitz concludes that among such a race the triumphs of the Cross were the more wonderful," and no one, in spite of the early decay of the Christian communities, can deny this when he considers the changes wrought in the savages by the efforts of the missionaries.

It is probable that the question of the conversion and civilization of the Indians will not be settled much before the extinction of their race; it is and always has been principally in the hands of the savages themselves and the frontiersmen who could not offer them a life desirable for imitation, but who freely made an exchange of vices with them, the heathen for once, in a bargain with the whites, getting probably as much as they gave. It is not for us here to pronounce which side is more or less in the wrong; we do not believe in the relegation of the Indian question to the next world; but this appears to be its destiny, whatever the right opinions may be, and we acquiesce without being persuaded.

In the mean time, the history of such a man as Zeisberger is very melancholy, very interesting reading. The man's character is brought out clearly, and the facts of his endurance and perseverance are not more surprising than the fact that he was not a zealot or an enthusiast. He certainly was a firm believer in the power of Christianity over all other forces, and if ever it seemed to fail, he recognized the will of God where a less religious spirit would have seen only evil. But he judges the Indians with perfect common sense, both before and after their conversion, and from the most thorough acquaintance with every phase of their life.

He entered upon his work among them when a very young man, and he labored for their conversion and civilization with varying success in different parts of Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, and Canada, though nearly always among Indians of the great Delaware race. Whatever could be done to ameliorate or enlighten them by the devotion of a clear, sound mind and strong, loving heart, he did for sixty-two years. He founded community after community, and saw them wasted and dispersed by the malice of circumstances, by war, murder, and corruption; but, undismayed, he proceeded to other efforts in new fields. In the midst of the labors of his vocation, and its manifold dangers and deprivations, he was able to study scientifically the native dialects, and to publish many works in them and upon them. He took all a scholar's pride and interest in these matters, and it is amusingly characteristic that, commenting upon Bishop Loskiel's History of the Mission to the North American Indians, n which Zeisberger is himself the chief figure, he should praise it somewhat, and then add, that "the orthography of the Indian words, however, was a disgrace to the work." An affecting evidence of the same fondness for his literary performances is the fact that, in his last hours, "nothing soothed him so much as Delaware hymns from his hymn-book, especially those appointed for the dying, which the Indians sung grouped around him."

This was at Goshen, the town on the Muskingum founded near the site of Gnadenhütten, where the dreadful massacre took place. The poor fellows who sung these hymns were often given over to the sin of drunkenness, to which they were tempted with a devilish perseverance by the white settlers; and Zeisberger was now dying, to all human perception, amidst the final ruin of his life-long hopes.

In the article "Gnadenhütten" we discussed so fully the Moravian theory and practice of civilizing the Indians, that it would be repetition to say anything here. Zeisberger was the great embodiment of their system, and in his life its history is told. How well Bishop de Schweinitz has done his work in acquainting us with this life we have said in general terms, but we must not fail to speak of the means he has had for making it thoroughly good. He has based it mainly upon the manuscripts in the archives of the Moravian Church, which consist not only of the reports of Zeisberger

and his fellow-missionaries to the Mission Board, but of the "voluminous journals of their every-day life among the Indians, as also complete reports of any occurrences of special interest." The author's careful study of these gives peculiar value to his chapters on Indian history and character, and freshness to his whole work. It is in every way complete, one of its final chap ters being devoted to an account of Zeisberger's literary labors, some notion of which may be gained by an examination of several of his manuscript works presented to the library of Harvard College.

The style of Bishop de Schweinitz's his tory is very clear and simple, with no ambition for mere artistic effect; while the work is at once full of a sincere piety, and remarkably free from the cant of "otherworldliness."

Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection: a Series of Essays. By ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE. New York: Macmillan & Co.

THE reader of Mr. Wallace's Essays will be greatly interested in the new facts and reasonings here brought to bear upon the theory of Natural Selection; and not a little interested in the person of Mr. Wallace himself, who, in addition to his qualities as a scientific observer, shows himself even remarkably free from that vicious temper of self-seeking and dogmatism with which the pursuit of science is not infrequently associated. Certainly no man can well exceed Darwin himself in the modesty, candor, and supreme devotion to truth which characterize all his researches. But we may freely say that in all these characteristics Mr. Wallace does not fall observably behind him.

Mr. Wallace's work consists of ten essays, all bearing more or less closely upon the law of Natural Selection, but all tending quite equally to spiritualize our conception of creative order, in leading us to regard creation no longer as a direct exhibition of Divine power, exerted in the production of existing species, but rather as an indirect or mediate exhibition of it, employed in giving them generic or universal substance. According to Mr. Darwin, Mr. Wallace, and indeed the whole strain of our recent scientific martyrology, there is no evidence appreciable to science of any specific creation

But since

ever having actually taken place. we can neither conceive of specific things as without being, nor yet as giving being to themselves, we are forced to conclude that they are created, only stipulating at the same time for liberty to push back their creation so far into the unrecorded past, as practically to identify the event with the constitution of nature. This is what gives the controversy its great philosophic interest, that it is thus driving men of science, who are too often superbly prone to sniff at such inquiries as metaphysical, to investigate the origin of existence, or demand an adequate philosophy of Mother Nature herself. For if species interpret themselves into Nature, what does Nature interpret herself into? There can be at bottom but one source of being; so that it really does not seem improbable from present tendencies that science may erelong conclude that material things have a rigidly spiritual origin, consisting in the uses they promote to higher existence thus that there is nothing so veritably supernatural, on the whole, as nature itself.

On its face, however, the controversy is no way philosophic, but purely scientific. The question debated is, whether species obey a natural law of evolution, each being a modification of some broader and cruder species; or whether they must all be regarded as so many original but successive types of creative power. This question begets any amount of conflicting ratiocination, because, like all scientific questions, it admits only of an approximate solution, being dependent for its settlement upon an endless array of counter-probabilities on either side. And we need not expect, therefore, that the problem in its strictly scientific aspect is going to be put at rest in our day. But we repeat that there is every reason to suppose that the controversy will soon be taken off this limited ground, and put upon a truly philosophic foundation. If the rival dispu tants can only be led to discern, as it would seem they cannot long avoid doing, that all true questions of material origin or nature are at bottom questions of spiritual destiny, they will at once and gladly leave off rummaging the underground cellars of history in search of the mystery of existence, and turn to its illumined upper stories, which are even now looming large upon the horizon of men's living faith, for the light that they alone are competent to supply. The scien tific instinct hitherto, and especially of late,

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jestic spiritual form to which it is altogether and abjectly ministerial, is not a whit more creditable to our intelligence, than it would be to cherish the disgusting viscera of the corpse for their own sake, and with no view to the lessons they reflect upon the health and disease of the living subject.

Vagabond Adventures. By RALPh Keeler. Boston: Fields, Osgood, & Co.

It is given to so few people to have run away from home in very early life, to have adopted the profession of negro-minstrelsy in fulfilment of the ambition of every boy for some sort of histrionic eminence, to have abandoned this art for the purpose of going through college, and then, after much travel in Europe and a course of study at Heidelberg University upon less money than most of us would like to starve upon at home, to have settled quietly down to writing for the magazines, that Mr. Keeler has at least one reason for making this curious and entertaining little book. The story was worth telling, even if he could have imparted to it no charm of narration and suggested no pleasant or useful reflections to his reader. But he has made it lively and agreeable in style, and he has addressed himself so skilfully to the reader's good sense as well as interest, that we believe the public will find it, as we do, a novelty in literature, and something very much better than a novelty. There is the flavor in it of the picaresque novel, without the final unpleasant tang of that species of fiction; and the author has so objectively studied his hero, that even where the latter falls into unpoetizable squalor, and has things happen him that you wish had not happened, you do not refer your repugnance to the historian, who, you feel, sees these things in the same light you do. On reflection, too, you are glad that he treats his subject so unsparingly, for a book has no business to be merely literature; and such a book as this especially ought to teach something, ought to disenchant youth with adventure, and show Poverty in her true colors, that people may use every honest effort to avoid her. That lean nymph is so apt in literature to take the imagination of the young, that it is well for once to see her as she is in real life: Mr. Keeler, who has walked up and down with her, like Constance with grief, and has the same reason to be fond of her, paints anything but a se

ducing picture of her. He keeps a surprising cheerfulness of temper throughout, but he does not pretend that his intimacy with poverty is ever enviable; and indeed there never was but one man had the heart voluntarily to perpetuate such a thing, and he was a saint, and not a literary man.

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There is something quite touching in the first of these vagabond adventures, that is to say, in the account of the boy who ran away from home; but the author does not directly appeal to sympathy for him. So strange facts have rarely been so simply told, and with such strict regard to the truth of local color and the integrity of the hero's character, who never thinks or does anything beyond his years. Those of our readers who remember Mr. Keeler's Atlantic papers, "Three Years as a Negro Minstrel" and "The Tour of Europe for $181 in Currency," are as well qualified as ourselves to pronounce them very interesting in substance and agreeable in manner: he has somewhat enlarged them, as they now stand, and they will bear a second reading singularly well. We think that the first two parts of the book are better in every way than the last they are better in style, and in fact they are more curious; for the poverty-stricken traveller and student is not so novel in literature, whilst the runaway boy and negro-minstrel, surviving to write of himself, is absolutely new. The minstrelsy paper is peculiarly entertaining to us people of the audience, who are always longing to know what the actors are like behind the scenes, and who have here the chance to see our delightful old friends with their burnt-cork off. It is immensely gratifying to find so much human nature in them, yes, so much more human nature than falls to the lot of most other men; and we ought all to be obliged to Mr. Keeler for the sincerity and good taste in which he has presented them. That company on the Floating Palace is one that it is charming to know through him; and the whole paper has now an historical value, for negro-minstrelsy, that sole growth of drama from American life, is now almost wholly passed away, and was waning even before slavery perished. Something else pleased us in this paper: perhaps it may be roughly described as confirmation of our belief that the truly American novel, when it comes to be written, will be a story of personal adventure after the fashion of Gil Blas, and many of the earlier English fictions.