all, but simply what the form is which he wants to draw, and how he can draw it most plainly and promptly. Decision of execution should always be the result of complete knowledge of the thing to be drawn; if from any other source, it will assuredly be only heedless scrawling, bad in proportion as it is energetic and decided.
The chapter on Perspective is full and well illustrated, and useful to architectural or mechanical draughtsmen, may-be, but little so to artists. There are, indeed, no laws of perspective which the careful draughtsman from Nature need ever apply, for his eye will show him the tendency of lines and the relative magnitude of bodies quicker than he can find them by the application of the rules of perspective,—and with much better result, since all application of science directly to artistic work endangers its poetic character, and almost invariably gives rise to a hardness and formalism the reverse of artistic, leading the artist to depend on what he knows ought to be rather than on what he really sees, a tendency more to be deprecated than any want of correctness in drawing.
The book contains chapters on artistic processes and technical matters generally, making it a useful hand-book to amateurs; but all that is really valuable to a young student of Art might be compressed into a very few pages of this ponderous book. To follow its prescriptions seriatim would be to him a serious loss of time and heart.
The New American Cyclopaedia. A Popular Dictionary of General Knowledge, Edited by George Ripley and Chas. A. Dana. Vol. II. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 8vo.
We have spoken so fully of the purpose and general character of this work, in noticing the first volume, that it is hardly necessary for us to speak at length of the second. In a rapid glance at its contents, it appears fully to bear out the promise of the first. We have noticed a few omissions, and some mistakes of judgment. It is, perhaps, impossible to preserve the gradation of reputations in such a work; but a zoologist must be puzzled when he sees Von Baer, the great embryologist, who made a classification of animals, founded on their development, which substantially agrees with that of Cuvier, founded on their structure, occupy about one tenth of the space devoted to Peter T. Barnum; however, we suppose, that, as Barnum created new animals, he is a more wonderful personage than Von Baer, who simply classified old ones. These occasional omissions and disturbances of the scale of reputations are, however, more than offset by the new information the editors have been able to incorporate into most of their biographies of the living, and not a few of those of the dead. Many persons who were mere names to the majority of the public are here, for the first time, recognized as men engaged in living lives as well as in writing books. Some of these biographies must have been obtained at the expense of much time and correspondence. Samuel Bayley, the author of "Essays on the Formation of Opinions," is one of these well-known names but unknown men; but in the present volume he has been compelled to come out of his mysterious seclusion, and present to the public those credentials of dates and incidents which prove him to be a positive existence on the planet.
The papers on Arboriculture, Architecture, Arctic Discovery, Armor, Army, Asia, Atlantic Ocean, Australia, Balance of Power, Bank, and Barometer, are excellent examples of compact and connected statement of facts and principles. The biographies of Aristotle, Aristophanes, Augustine, Ariosto, and Arnold, and the long article on Athens, are among the most striking and admirable papers in the volume. As the purpose of the work is to supply a Cyclopaedia for popular use, it is inevitable that students of special sciences or subjects should be occasionally disappointed at the comparatively meagre treatment of their respective departments of knowledge. In regard to the articles in the present volume, it may be said that such subjects as Astronomy and the Association of Ideas should have occupied more space, even if the wants of the ordinary reader were alone consulted. But still, when we consider the vast range and variety of topics included in this volume, and the fact that it comprehends a dozen subjects which a dozen octavos devoted to each would not exhaust, we are compelled to award praise to the editors for contriving to compress into so small a space an amount of information so great.
