Perthes as connected with the book-trade. Inexplicably to us, while this book is passing through edition after edition in Germany, and the same is true of its translation in Great Britain, it is unknown here. And if it shall be reprinted, it is to be feared that it may be in its reduced English form, which omits nearly all those details of the book business, which we have therefore tried in some measure to supply. We hope soon to see this book well known in America. The domestic life which it reveals is so touchingly beautiful that all national distinctions vanish before it, and the German wife of Frederick Perthes, and the German children of this publisher of books, become as near to us and as prized by us as the most affectionately remembered of our own countrymen. And although these memoirs have a great charm from the insight which they give into the practical working of one of the most fascinating branches of business; although they do so reveal the inner life of one who may be justly called a MAN; although they bring the history of Central Europe for the last sixty years close before our eyes; although they show the changing currents of theological belief, and mark the ebb and the flood of that tide, yet we can but think that men will prize this book rather for the domestic love and household wisdom that breathes within it, than for any other qualities. The life of Caroline Perthes, now before our people, contains, however, this part of the whole history of Perthes's life.

It remains to say but one word more of the literary execution of the work. The translation is admirable; not a trace of stiffness betrays that it is brought over from another tongue; while the biographer has executed his work in an almost faultless manner. A vein of thoughtfulness, or what we may call applied philosophy, runs through it all, and while there is no language of adulation, not a word of indiscriminate praise, the great souled, energetic, practical German, stands displayed as in a portrait of Denner or Van Dyck.

ARTICLE III.-HINTS ABOUT FARMING.

Outlines of the First Course of Yale Agricultural Lectures. By HENRY S. OLCOTT. New York: C. M. Saxton & Co. Our Farm of Four Acres, and the money we made by it. Twelfth Edition. London: Chapman & Hall.

For the man who can afford to buy almost everything he needs, and sell very little that he raises, farming is a delightful amusement; for the man who can afford to sell almost everything that he raises, and to buy little or nothing that he needs, farming is a lucrative employment. The agricultural writers must not be indignant if we put down, thus, in blunt style, a couple of propositions which yet do carry a great deal of homely truth with them. Of course there are exceptions; of course we have all seen the nice array of statistics in the premium reports, which make it plain that corn which sells for a dollar a bushel, can be grown for some thirty cents; and which seem to demonstrate that butter which will bring twenty-five cents a pound, can be made for less than the half of it. The Agricultural Journals, too, from time to time, think it worth their while to argue this matter with the public; and to impress upon them the fact that farmers are, upon the whole, the most fortunate, and thrifty, and money-making people in the world. We must confess that this seems to us a sad waste of ammunition on their part. The world has a very keen scent for whatever business is money-making. The public is constantly on the alert for ocular demonstration; argument makes too tedious a proof. If the managers of the Great Eastern Steamship, or of the Southern Michigan Railway, for instance, should issue a lively tract to show the great monied value of their respective enterprises, and their promise in way of investment, we should view the tract writing as both natural and needful. But if, on the other hand, the New York and New Haven Railway, or the next India Rubber Company,

were to argue with the public in that fashion, we should look sharply out for some new Norwalk damages, or a suspension of the Goodyear patent. The hens that lay golden eggs never cackle; at least we never heard them.

It is our impression, looking from a New England standpoint it is true, that the wiry old farmers, who have stocking legs of Mexican dollars or other specie laid by in their cupboards, beside certain certificates of stocks, and may be, mortgages upon the farms of their less provident neighbors, are not very boastful of their profits. They love to croak rather; they count their business a hard one; they affect a tone of discouragement; and it is very doubtful, indeed, if their economies have not added more to any surplus they possess, than their skill.

Your retired citizen, on the other hand, with some maggot in his brain about pomology, or the "Qua cura boum," is always of a very sanguine temperament as regards profits. He loves to tell you, in a confidential way, what his last year's sales of butter amounted to, and how many tons of good English hay his reclaimed meadow will carry to the acre. He somehow seems to entertain the belief that every looker on thinks he is spending a great deal of money, with very little return; and he is nervously anxious to talk down any such fallacy. Expenses are large, certainly; but a great many of them go to investment, he tells us. Digging rocks is heavy business, to be sure; but once out of the way, and the Michigan plough will not have its nose broken again. Trenching, too, is a thing of very saucy cost,-particularly where the soil is underlaid with hard pan, or with boulders; but, then-what vegetables will come of it! And yet the keen, wary countrybred man, next door, who has faith in seven inch ploughing and plenty of barn-yard manure, who works early and who works hard, shall very likely outsell his neighbor of the trenches. It is surprising how much energy and thrift will accomplish with very poor weapons; and surprising what poor things good weapons are without them.

We have been led into this train of talk by a little book which has had great success in England the year past, and

which is called "Our Farm of Four Acres, and the money we made by it." The book has not much bigness of any kind; it is scarce larger than a child's book, and our readers may be curious to know that the MS. was offered for fifty pounds to a London publisher, and declined; another, upon urgence, consented to accept and issue it on the basis of "half profits;" the result has been a payment already to the authoress of something over four hundred pounds. We attribute its popularity very much to the general interest now a days, in the ways and means of country living; and more, perhaps, to its straight-forward, Defoe-like narrative of every day experience. When will the book-makers learn that the simplest way to tell a story, is the best way?

A London lady wrote the book; one who found herself unexpectedly compelled to seek a home in the country; her children require fresh air; the yearly accounts require a more economic footing; she hopes that little breadth of land (only four acres) may give both. There are a great many people, not in England only, who watch eagerly such a struggle as that. And the lady comes well out of it. There is a pony who does service between the station and the cottage; there is a gardener who is fag of all work; there is a paddock delightfully green; there is a spotted cow that kicks and gives anxiety as to pleuro, but finally subsides into a kindly and domestic career of curds and creams. There are hens that lay incontinently, and rabbits who die mysteriously, and do not figure upon the account of profits. Pigeons swoop in purple phalanx around the roofs of the homestead, and give luxurious finish to the country experiment in eggs and squabs.

But, after all, the question about Farming, which intelligent people have to consider now-a-days, is not compassed within the green covers of this Four Acre book; it is not whether a prudent gentlewoman, who is a notable housewife can make the ends meet by dint of curds, and sweet turnips, and a good flock of ducklings; but it is-whether Farming, upon the whole, is a profession warranting a certain degree of scientific culture, and giving room for its display ;-whether it is worthy

to enlist the energies and the ambition of a young man who has a good life to live, and a career to make?

The other book, Mr. Olcott's excellent report of the last winter's Agricultural Lectures in New Haven, puts us naturally upon this new train of thought.

If you have a boy (we hope every grown man has one) in whom you have joy and pride, has it ever occurred to you that Farming was a profession in which his intelligence might find range, and his cultivation declare itself and his energy and labor meet with sufficient reward? Is it a trade which for its successful prosecution demands scientific attainment and skill, and will remunerate them; and if so, then what degree of attainment does it demand, and what is the measure of remuneration?

We shall answer these questions in our own random way by hints and intimations and hypotheses, from which our readers may fashion such reply as seems to them fitting.

A great deal of good work has been done in the world, and good farming among the rest, without any intelligent apprehension of the physical laws which govern the work. Chemistry instructs us about mortars and cements; but before the days when hydrates and ores of manganese were talked of, the Roman masons piled up the dome of the Pantheon; and there it stands in the little fish-market at Rome, with better cement in it than our master-builders mix,-holding steadfastly on its round shoulders the weight of eighteen centuries. They had fat crops, "lætas segetes," about Mantua in Virgil's time, though they knew nothing of Mr. Mapes's superphosphates. A man without the slightest knowlege of the botanical classification of asparagus, or of its chemical constitution, could rear a good bed of it, rank-growing, and tender, by following literally the directions of Cato, (Do Re Rust. CLXI,) who knew no more about asparagine or a tubular calyx, than we know about the market price of those famous shoots of Ravenna, of which Pliny says, three weighed a pound.

So old Crescenzio, whose discourse comes to us on the same middle-age vellum that smacks of the loves of Bembo, and the wickednesses of the Borgia, has given as good, and as jock