The Press.
London, England, 1855-01-27 00:00:00

THE PRESS.

and that when he has made the working classes comfort-
able, and got bitter beer put into proper-sized pint bottles,
there will be nothing further fur him left to do. Mr.
Sentiment is certainly a very powerful man, and perhaps
not the less so that his good poor people are so very good
his hard rich people so very hard ; and the genuinely
honest so very honest. Namby-pamby in these days is
not thrown away if it be introduced in the proper quarters.
Divine peeresses are no longer interesting, though
possessed of every virtue; bat a pattern peasant or an
immaculate manufacturing hero may talk as much twaddle
as one of Mrs. Rateliffe's heroines, and still be listened to.
Perhaps, however, Mr. Sentiment's great attraction is in
his second-rate characters. if his heroes and heroines
walk upon stilts, as heroes and heroines, l fear, ever must,
their attendant satellites are as natural as though one met
them in the street: they walk and talk like men and
women, and live among oar Mends a iattling, lively life ;
yes, live, and will live tall the names of their callings shall
be forgotten in their own, and Buckett and Mrs. Cramp will
be the only words left to us to signify a detective police
officer or a monthly nurse.
On the whole, as we have said, this book is
clever, but the description is occasionally use-
lessly coarse, reminding us of the blemish of
the style of a popular writer whose name the
author's also recalls.

Australia and its Gold Fields. By E. H. Hargraves.
London : Ingram and Co.
THIS book is made of extracts from a series of lec-
tures delivered at the Geological Museum some
three years ago, and since published, a chapter or
two of personal reminiscences which have been
paraded before the public already in every shilling
pamphlet upon the Australian gold fields, and a few
remarks upon the land question, in which personal
spleen against the squatters is very evident, pro-
voked, if report speaks truly, by the opinions ex-
pressed in the Legislative Council at Sydney by
those gentlemen of Mr. Hargraves. The grammatical
construction of the volume is tolerably correct on the
whole, though marked here and there by the peculiar
style of Mr. Hargraves, who, it will be remembered,
in one of his reports to the Governor-General of
Australia, informed Sir Charles Fitzroy in the
following words, that he (Mr. Hargraves) had met
the Rev. W. B. Clarke, the geologist, " I am happy
"to state that I have met the Rev. W. B. Clarke,
" and that me and Mr. Clarke is now the very best
"of friends." "Me and Mr. Clarke" continues a
standing joke in Australia at this moment. Accord-
ing to Mr. Hargraves, his expectations when he first
discovered the existence of gold at Summer-hill
Creek were of rather an extravagant kind. "This,"
I exclaimed to my guide, "is a memorable day in
" the history of New South Wales. I shall be is
" baronet, you will be knighted, and my old horse
" will be stuffed, put into a glass case, and sent to
" the British Museum." He did not think fit, how-
ever, to stipulate for a greater fixed sum as his
reward than 5001. The Legislative Council subse•
quently voted him 10,0001., and Mr. Hargraves does
not complain, though he thinks he made " a very
bad bargain," in trusting his reward to the liberality
of that body. The book is cheap, and from the
notoriety Mr. Hargraves has attained will probably
sell well. He has not been well advised, however,
to prefix his portrait to the volume: a better map
would have been more acceptable, and less liable to
ill-natured remark.

A Treatise on the Elements of Algebra. By G.
Ainesworth, BA., and J. Yeats, F.R.G.S. Lou
don : Ingram and Co. .

THIII treatise, which has been preposterously praised
by some of our contemporaries, is chiefly valu-
able for its large and well-chosen collection of
examples, and if algebra were to be learned
by the solution of problems alone would be
a real acquisition to the student. But, besides
employing results in the abbreviation of arithmetical
operations, the young mathematician must be led
from first principles simply and clearly expressed by
demonstrations perfectly logical to the results them-
selves in all their generality, and in this case we fear
the present treatise will afford but little assistance.
It is far behind many works of much smaller pre-
tentions in clearness and logical accuracy. Those
who measure their advance in a subject by the
number of pages gone over in a given time—and
most beginners in mathematics are of this class—
will find the present a satisfactory guide : it is easy
because real difficulties are never fairly encountered,
while those who seek even a clear statement of the
difficulties which beset the first principles of algebra,
and much more those who desire their solution, must
go to larger and more expensive works. It is really
astonishing to read the slovenly proofs given here of
important truths ; and after the publication of
elementary works like De Morgan's their admission
in a later treatise argues unpardonable carelessness
or ignorance on the part of the compilers. The
difficulties of the negative sign are not even hinted
at,ithe old demonstration of the Principle of Indeter-