LAW. The Student's Law Lexicon. A Dictionary of Legal Words and Phrases, with Appendices Explaining Abbreviations and References to Reports, and Giving the Meaning of Latin and French Maxims Commonly Found in Law Books. By WILLIAM C. COCHRAN, of the Cincinnati Bar. 12mo, pp. 332. Cincinnati : Robert Clarke & Co. Price, law sheep, $2 50. A Manual for Notaries Public, General Conveyancers, Commissioners, Justices, Mayors, Consuls, etc., as to Acknowledgments, Affidavits, Depositions, Oaths, Proofs, Protesis, etc., for each State and Territory, with Forms and Instructions. By FLORIEN GIAUQUE, of the Cincinnati Bar, Author of A Manual for Assignees, A Manual for Guardians, Election Laws of the United States, etc. 8vo, pp. 388. Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co. Price, cloth, $2; law sheep, $2 50. Chromatic Chart and Manual of Parliamentary Law. By J. Ross LEE. 24mo, pp. 14. Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co. Price, stiff paper covers, 25 cents; leather, 50 cents. The above books should be owned by every las man, as they relate to every-day affairs having a legal aspect, and abound with information that he needs, and will appreciate when in possession of it. To the clergy the Lexicon and Chromatic Chart will prove invaluable. So related is the minister's vocation to civil life, and so involved with its complications and perplexities, that a knowledge of legal phrases, modes of procedure, and of the Latin and French maxims in constant use will more fully equip him for his sympathetic and life-searching work. Next to a study of the Gospel it is important to understand not only the Mosaic moral and civil law, but also the legislation of civilization, and the spirit of law in these days touching progress, reform, and the common elevation of the race. The Lexicon will be helpful in this direction. The Chromatic Chart will enable one, however hitherto unfamiliar with parliamentary forms and usages, to preside with dignity, culture, accuracy, and grace at any public meeting, and to acquire skill and self-possession as a participant in the proceedings of legislative or other bodies, with small expenditure of time and little outlay of money. These books are therefore officially indorsed. MISCELLANEOUS. Lee & Shepard, Boston, Mass., gratify the fiction-readers with Readings from the Waverly Novels, by Albert F. Blaisdell, and Biding his Time, by J. T. Trowbridge, two books of charming mechanical neatness and very readable contents. Harper & Brothers continue the issue of attractive novels, A Christmas Rose and The Countess Eve being among the latest, while in In Far Lochaber and The World Went Very Well Then the highwater mark of modern fiction is realized by their authors. Purchasers of this kind of literature should see that the imprint of either house is on the title-page, if they are in search of safe and wholesome books. The Guide to Holiness will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary next year. It was commenced in 1839 by Rev. TIMOTHY MERRITT as The Guide to Christian Perfection. The name was afterward changed to The Guide to Holiness. Its catholicity and non-controversial character have given it favor among all denominations. Its present editors are Mrs. Dr. PALMER and Rev. GEORGE HUGHES, and it has a world-wide circulation. Subscription price, $1 per year, including postage. The programme for the semi-centennial year is attractive. Any person desiring sample copies should address PALMER & HUGHES, 62 & 64 Bible House, New York. Hand-Book of Canadian Dates. By FRED. A. McCORD, Assistant Law Clerk, House of Commons. 16mo, pp. 102. Montreal: Dawson Brothers. Price, flexible cloth, 75 cents. History, political, religious, governmental and social, is here most admirably skeletonized, imposing upon the reader the delightful task of clothing the events with the flesh of the circumstances that always constitute the most interesting and sometimes the most visible features of the movements of men. As a reference manual on Canadian matters this is indispensable, and belongs to the best class of books for ready hand use. Harper's Young People, 1888. 8vo, pp. 928. New York: Harper & Brothers Price, $3 50. This bound volume is a prize. Few there are who will dispute that this great publishing house provides one of the best young people's papers in circulation in this country. Unlike a religious paper, it enters every field of human life, and is historical, biographical, poetical, and scientific, and is crowded with illustrations, puzzles stories, and that kind of miscellaneous reading that adapts it to all households, small or large, rich or poor, ignorant or intelligent, pious or depraved. It is a civilizer in the home. The Gospel in All Lands for 1887. 4to, pp. 576. Representing the Missionary New York: Phillips & Huut This bound copy is valuable for reference as to the condition and customs of nations, and the missionary movements of the Church among them during the year 1887. Chronicles and the Mosaic Legislation. By MILTON S. TERRY, D.D. New York: Funk & Wagnails. A critical document, answering rationalists and vindicating the historicity and canonicity of these books. The Doctrines and Discipline of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1888. With an Appendix. Edited by Bishop S M. MERRILL. 16mo, pp. 468. New York: Phillips & Hunt. Cincinnati: Cranston & Stowe. Price, 25 cents. Journal of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, held in New York, May 1-31, 1888. Edited by Rev. DAVID S. MONROE, D.D., Secretary of the Conference. 8vo, pp. 787. New York: Phillips & Hunt. Cincinnati: Cranston & Stowe. What Shall we Do with the Sunday School as an Institution? By GEORGE LANSING All Around the Year. By J. PAULINE SUNTER. Boston: Lee & Shepard. METHODIST REVIEW. MAY, 1889. ART. I.—PERSISTENCY OF ETHNIC TRAITS. THE student of history must be constantly surprised to see recurring, after the lapse of centuries, the personal and race peculiarities of the ancient peoples. The institutional forms of human society are not nearly so long-lived as are manners and customs. Even those great political organizations to which we give the name of governments are comparatively evanescent. If we take those that have longest survived we shall find their career to have been but brief compared with the epochs of geology, archæology, or anthropology. A vast majority of the governments which have been instituted by men have not survived a century from the date of their founding. A few have lived longer. Among the kingdoms of Western Asia, Assyria held a single organic form from the last year of the fourteenth century B. C. to the forty-seventh year of the eighth century, a total of five hundred and forty-three years. In North-eastern Africa Egypt had a continuous existence from Menes to 525 B. C., a period a little over three thousand years in duration. In Europe the two conspicuous examples of political longevity have been Rome and England. The former, from the founding of the city to the overthrow of Romulus the Little, survived for twelve hundred and twenty-nine years; the latter, from Alfred to Victoria, has reached a span of a little over a thousand years. Thus much for the occasional persistency of political institutions. The real life of man is far removed from his political form. 21-FIFTH SERIES, VOL. V. Instead of being the first, the political garb is the last expression of his methods as a human creature. There are, however, other garments which fit him more closely and last much longer. The political form of society is only a spectacular overcoat-a thing easily seen and easily described, but very loose and readily removed from the person. Men have carried into all parts of the earth into which they have distributed themselves the race peculiarities inherited from their ancestry, and the actual activities of mankind are much more ethnic in their derivation than they are civil or political. Indeed, I am almost willing to hazard the assertion that all the major realities of human life are deduced from the ethnic side. They have come down from antiquity with the blood of the race, and find expression in a thousand ways which, taken in the aggregate, constitute history. This ethnic life of man is the indestructible part; the part which is transmitted from age to age, receiving increments in different centuries and from different sources, constituting what may be called the immortali ties of human society. It thus happens that when we look abroad at a given race and attempt to determine its physiognomy, to describe its motives and conduct, we find an assemblage of ethnic traits struggling for expression. The old method in history sought simply to delineate; to give pictorial representation of things as they appeared to the eye of sense; to paint, as if on a flat canvas, the aspect of things. The new method seeks perspective. It considers the aspect only as the current expression of the forces which lie behind it. It lays all the stress upon the movement of human society, and very little on the visible features. In this way it happens that the scrutiny of the student of history is constantly fixed on what we here call ethnic traits; and in the consideration of these the one thing which most surprises his ideal and most instructs his critical faculties is the persistency of race characteristics. He perceives at a glance that they assert and reässert themselves in so many forms, and constitute the real explanations of so great a part of human conduct, as to be in reality the vital body of the subject which he is to investigate. It is the purpose of this article to note a few examples of those ethnic peculiarities which, in spite of all vicissitude and all catastrophe, live on, rising out of the past into the present, and constituting at once the most invariable and the most vital part of human conduct. The persistency of linguistic phenomena must have attracted the attention of all observers. The accent and voice of the father are not more certainly transmitted to the child than are the accent and voice of the race transmitted to posterity. It is easier to overthrow a kingdom than to subvert an accent. It is possible to show that peculiar inflections of the voice, and peculiar forms of emphasis, have survived much more than a thousand years on the tongues of the descendants of some tribe by whose original instincts the peculiarities in question were devised. Long before Greek was Greek, in the highlands of Phrygia, the people-in what stage of the human evolution we scarcely know-spoke a dialect the words of which were mostly paroxytone; that is, the accent was thrown back from the ultimate syllable. In ages afterward, when the old Æolic Greeks, first of the Hellenic tribes, came island-wise across the Egean, they carried this peculiarity of speech into Hellas; and ever afterward the Eolian Greek persisted in preserving the quality of the ancestral tongue. Later on, among the western nations of Northern Greece, -the Epirotes, and particularly the Illyrians, to say nothing of the Macedonians, who had the same dialectical inflections-the Greek accent continued to differ from the Doric and Attic. Greek of the south. Still further on, we discover among the Aryan tribes of Central Italy on the west, the vanguard of the Græco-Italic race, mere adventurers aggregating in Latium, nearly all males at first, robbers by profession, not nearly so tearful in their sentiments as Father Æneas was in the Vergilian fiction, those primitive Albanian fathers-Romans, in short. Every student of language knows with what assiduity the Latin tongue avoided an accent on the ultimate. Down to the present day, in the dialects of Albania and even in the Italian language itself, we may find the evidences of this linguistic peculiarity, which made its appearance among the Phrygian ancestors of the Græco-Italic race more than fifteen hundred years before our era. Is it possible to intensify negation? that is, when a negative particle has been once thrown into a sentence does that end the |