of difficulties and dangers at nearly every step of the way, she always persevered, almost always finding the difficulties vanish as she approached the spot. It was after she had already travelled extensively, and had made arrangements for transferring her collection to Kew, that she met Charles Darwin for the first time. In her eyes, as in the eyes of many, he was the greatest man living, and she was much flattered at his wish to see her. When he told her that he thought she ought not to attempt any representation of the vegetation of the world until she had seen and painted that of Australia, because of its unlikeness to any other, she determined to take it as a royal command and to go at once.

On the way thither, she took occasion to make another visit at Borneo. On her first visit, she had found pitcher-plants growing wild and winding themselves amongst the tropical bracken of the untouched forest. The pic tures of it which she had carried home had led to sending out a traveller for the seeds from which plants had been raised in England, Sir Joseph Hooker naming the species Nepenthes Northiana. At a state dinner with which she was honored on her present return to Borneo, the whole centre of the table was covered with pitcher-plants enough to make the fortune of an English nurseryman, but which were little appreciated in their native country. But more memorable than this dinner festivity was another day in Borneo, which is so favorable an illustration of the manner in which the unexpected constantly happened to our traveller that an account of it shall be given in her own words:

"One morning I picked a huge branch of the petræa meaning to spend the day in painting it, though it was so common there, when I came on a lovely spray of white orchid and picked it grudgingly to paint, then suddenly found that every tree was loaded with the same, and the boathouse roof looked as if there had

been a sudden snowstorm. The air was scented with it, so I got more, and when I reached the house found the drawing-room full of it. They called it the Turong Bird, and said it came out spontaneously into bloom three times in the year, and only lasted a day, and that I must be quick and draw it, for I should find none the next day. It was true; the next day the lovely flowers were hanging like rags.

"When I went to finish another sketch, I was astounded at the sight of a huge lily, with white face and pink stalks and backs, resting its heavy head on the ground. It grew from a single-stemmed plant, with grand curved leaves above the flower, and was called there the Brookiana lily, but Kew magnates call it Crinum augustum; its head was two feet across, and I had to take a smaller specimen to paint, in order to get it into my half-sheet of paper life-size. It was

scented like vanilla. Another crinum has since been called Northiana, after myself. It has a magnificent flower, growing almost in the water, each plant becoming an island at high tide, with beautiful reflections under it, and its perfect white petals enriched by the

bright pink stamens which hang over them."

The Australian tour was an inexhaustible series of delights. At one point, she found twenty-five different species of wild-flowers in ten minutes, close to the house where she was stopping, and painted them. In Western Australia were flowers such as she had never seen nor dreamed of before, the whole country being a natural flower-garden, where she could wander for miles and miles among the bushes and never meet a soul. Most of the flowers were very small and delicate; it was impossible to paint half of them, and the only difficulty was to choose.

The Australian journey ended, a year was spent in fitting and framing and patching and sorting the pictures, the building at Kew having been completed during her absence. It was opened to the public June 7, 1882.

It might naturally be expected that a woman who was fifty years old, somewhat deaf, and not a little broken in health, would now be content to stay at home, enjoying the fruit of her own labors and intercourse with persons of similar tastes. But there was still one continent Africa without representation in her gallery, and she resolved to begin painting there without loss of time. Two months after the opening of the gallery she was on her way to South Africa, and soon hard at work again in the ways she loved best. Here, as in Australia, she was overwhelmed by the extraordinary novelty and variety of the different species; it seemed impossible to paint fast enough in a land where the hills were covered with low bushes, heaths, sundews, geraniums, lobelias, salvias, babanias and other bulbs, daisies growing into trees, purple broom, polygalas, tritomas, and crimson velvet hyobanche.

With only brief periods of rest at home, two more long voyages followed,-one to Seychelles Islands, and another to Western South America. Just before starting on the last one, a great pleasure came to her in a letter from the Queen expressing her appreciation of Miss North's benefaction to the English nation, and regretting her inability to make a public recognition of it (by knighthood or otherwise).

Such an interesting personality as this energetic and scholarly woman could not fail to attract to herself other interesting personalities. There are pleasant pictures of her ac

quaintance with Sir Joseph Hooker, Charles Darwin, Professor Owen, Asa Gray and his wife, Miss Gordon Cumming, besides many distinguished foreigners and English officials abroad, who were ever ready to serve her in all her plans.

The book is edited by Mrs. John Addington Symonds, the sister of Miss North; but, except the last half-dozen pages, scarcely anything has been added by the editor's hand. TheRecollections" end with the year 1886, when from the rural home she had made for herself at Alderley she writes:

"I have found the exact place I wished for, and already my garden is becoming famous among those who love plants; and I hope it may serve to keep my en-. emies, the so-called 'nerves,' quiet for the few years which are left me to live. The recollections of my happy life will also be a help to my old age. No life is so charming as a country one in England, and no flowers are sweeter or more lovely than the primroses, cowslips, bluebells, and violets, which grow in abundance all round me here."

Four years later, at the age of sixty, she died, these last years having been shadowed by painful illness. But into her life had already been compressed work sufficient for the lives of four ordinary women. A natural stately presence, a simple yet dignified manner, helped her in facing all sorts and conditions of men ; she inspired respect everywhere, and found everywhere persons eager and glad to help her. She travelled, not to pass the time, but because she had a self-appointed task, and she would not allow herself to rest until she had accomplished it. Her memory is perpetuated through the names of five different plants, four of which were first figured and introduced by her to European notice. The Nepenthes Northiana, the large pitcher-plant of Borneo, appears as a cover design on these handsome and thoroughly attractive volumes.

als and Christian evidences; he was the author of several text-books, composed chiefly of lectures prepared for his classes in these subjects; he was an earnest and uplifting preacher of chapel discourses and of solemn baccalaureate sermons; he was president for many years of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions; he was a cheerful Christian theologian, defining faith to be "confidence in a personal being," dwelling but lightly upon man's original sin and total depravity, regarding the incarnation as an expression of God's thought of the value of man, the atonement as the wonderful divine way of purifying those whom God could not let go, and election, not as the arbitrary choosing of "worms to be sons," but the acceptance by God of a being made in his image, on the ground of trust in the divine Son, and the foreknowledge that certain persons would exercise that trust.

"A peculiar beauty and sweetness is in the farewell words to the class of 1872, the last of thirty-six classes graduated under Dr. Hopkins's presidency :- And now, my beloved friends, the time has come when, in some respects, that which has been is to be no longer. Not only is the peculiar and most pleasant relation which has existed between us the past year to cease, but also the relation which I have so long held to this college. During the thirty-six years of that relation I have failed but twice, once from sickness and once from absence, to address each successive class as I now address you. Hereafter other classes will come, another voice will address them, the circular movement will go on, but you and I pass into the onward movement, you to your work, and I to what remains to me of mine. Behind us is that past, fixed forever, which God will require. Before us-what? Definitely I know not; but I do know that there is One above us whom we may safely trust. I do know that "God is love." Whatever else I hold on to, or give up, I will hold on to that. That I will not give up. To the God of love, therefore, who has hitherto been so much better to me than my fears, do I commit myself; to the God of love do I commend you, every one of you, praying that in all your pilgrimage He will bless you and keep you; that "He will make his face shine upon you, and be gracious unto you; that He will lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.'

Though most of Dr. Hopkins's published writings (a list of ninety of which is given at the end of the book under review) are either sermons or lectures upon moral or religious questions, yet it is not as a religious leader, but as an educator, as president of Williams College, that he is destined to be best known and longest remembered. His moral, religious, and philosophical views were not in any sense epoch-making or in advance of his times,perhaps in some respects hardly up with his times. Just as he aimed to make of Williams College an eminently safe and sound and

wholesome place for the traditional "liberal education" of young men, so he aimed to make of himself an eminently safe and sound and wholesome instructor, whose views should be only liberal enough to prevent them from becoming unattractive or repellant to young minds. It might be interesting to trace in the development of his own character and views an evidence of that evolutionary adaptation to environment and to the task to be performed, and of that survival of the fittest, which he rejected and repudiated as Darwinian doctrines.

The amount of strictly biographical matter in Mr. Carter's book is but small. Indeed, the work should hardly be called a biography, for it is rather a series of detached lectures upon different phases and aspects of the character and activity of Dr. Hopkins. The meager stock of information and anecdote touching his earlier years is to be explained, partly, as suggested, by the fact that, since he lived to old age (eighty-five years), most of the friends of his youth died before him, and partly by the fact that there was nothing so extraordinary about his early doings and sayings as to make them memorable. Later on in life he is treated, not continuously as the man, but successively as the professor, administrator, teacher, author, preacher, friend, theologian. Two events in his life are deemed of sufficient importance to call for treatment each in separate chapters. These events are the rebellion of the students at Williams College in 1868 against the grading system, and the action of the American Board touching candidates who believed in a probation after death. In the first of these crises Dr. Hopkins was found upon the conservative side, and yet appeared more liberal than his colleagues; in the second, he was found upon the liberal side, and yet appeared as conservative as any.

It is as the teacher and as the friend that Dr. Hopkins appears in the most charming and enviable light. He gave himself generously to his work, perhaps sacrificing even more than he should of his own personal development in his devotion to the task of developing more immature minds. We are told how, in the early days of a presidency which he held for thirty-six years, he assumed, in order the better to teach anatomy in a college which had no money to buy apparatus, the responsibility of buying a six-hundred-dollar manikin and of paying for it by itinerant lecturing and by showing his man.

"It was in December when the president started out with his manikin carefully packed in the box to go to his native town, Stockbridge, and there to lecture to secure money wherewith to pay for his apparatus. It was good sleighing, but the box so filled up the sleigh that the lecturer had to ride with his feet hanging outside of the vehicle. It was not a dignified or comfortable position for a college president, who was to drive thirty miles on a cold day, but at this distance of time there is something impressive in the picture. That lonely ride, with its stern purpose, is the expression of the solitude and earnestness that marked his career as a college president. It is an epitome of many years of patient self-denying devotion to the institution to which he had given his life, and to depart from which flattering calls to positions of comparative ease did not seem to tempt him. It appears that the lectures were successful so far as the satisfaction of the audience was concerned, but how much threatened still to come out of the President's salary, at that time about $1,100, to pay for the manikin, does not appear."

his tact, his kindliness, his reverence for religAbundant testimony is given to prove that ion, produced a lasting effect upon the young minds entrusted to his care. He bestowed on unflagging, and is now rewarded by a grateful his pupils a friendly personal interest that was personal loyalty that is undying. Perhaps no one deserves better than Mark Hopkins to be held up to the world as the typical American teacher of the nineteenth century, and in closing a review of his life no citation could be more fitting than one given by Mr. Carter before the chapter headed "The Teacher," and taken from Cardinal Newman's "St. Philip in his School":

"Love is his bond, he knows no other fetter,

Asks not our all, but takes whate'er we spare him,
Willing to draw us on from good to better,
As we can bear him.

"When he comes near to touch us and to bless us,
Prayer is so sweet that hours are but a minute;
Mirth is so pure, though freely it possess us,

Sin is not in it.

"Thus he conducts by holy paths and pleasant
Innocent souls, and sinful souls forgiven,
Toward the bright palace where our God is present,
Throned in high heaven."

EDWARD PLAYFAIR ANDERSON.

OUR UNWRITTEN CONSTITUTION.*

It is a much-mooted question, among jurists and constitutional students, whether we have, in this land of written constitutions, any additions thereto in the character of unwritten constitution. Professor C. G. Tiedeman has taken

*THE UNWRITTEN CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Fundamentals of American Constitutional Law. By Christopher G. Tiedeman, A.M. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

the affirmative of this question, and his latest treatise, The Unwritten Constitution of the United States," is a thesis in support of his position.

There is a fundamental difference between the British and the American type of constitution, outside of the feature that one is unwritten and the other written. The unwritten constitution of Great Britain is a flexible aggregation of rules and principles, changeable by Parliament from time to time, according to the popular will as contemporaneously ascertained. These rules and principles are said to be fundamental, but they are not fundamental in the American sense. As Professor Tiedeman states,

"There is no binding force in the prohibitions of Magna Charta, except so far as they are now voiced by public sentiment; if an act of Parliament should be passed in accordance with some great public demand, the fact that it violated these principles would not prevent its enforcement by the courts." These remarks will apply to all the principles of the English Constitution. Many of them are administered by the courts while they remain in force. They have not, however, the characteristics of fundamental law in the American sense. The principles of the American Constitution may be built upon to a larger extent. The term fundamental" must be differently understood in examining the two systems; and hence the idea of a "constitution" is not the same in both. It is for this reason that Great Britain has no such body of constitutional law as that which forms so important a part of American jurisprudence.

Professor Tiedeman's thesis seems to have been written to illustrate an American “unwritten constitution" in the British sense of the term, that "unwritten constitution whose flexible rules reflect all the changes in public opinion." It is true, he expects to find that "unwritten constitution" in "the decisions of the courts and acts of the legislature which are published and enacted in the enforcement of the written constitution," a development, as it were, out of the latter. But what he there finds, he characterizes as "constantly changing with the demands of the popular will," and thus he imputes to it the same characteristics as those of the unwritten constitution of Great Britain. It is a question worthy of serious consideration, whether any rules or principles, however well established to present appearance, can be considered a part of our constitution, unless they have been so adopted and made fundamental as to be enforceable in

the courts. The constitution in the American sense is fundamental in this respect; its every rule and principle is so enforceable, because our system makes it a legal rule. Can any practice or usage, not so enforceable, be regarded as any part of an American constitution, written or unwritten?

The illustrative instances of supposed unwritten constitution collected by Professor Tiedeman are presented without reference to this distinction. Among them are the change in the practical working of the electoral college, and the general public sentiment against a third presidential term. These, however, are usages, not laws. They correspond to what Professor Dicey calls, under the English system, "the conventionalities of the constitution," as distinguished from the law of the constitution. The test-question is: Does either of these usages establish or confer a right which the judicial department of the government will undertake to protect? The essayist argues that the practice of selecting presidential electors by a strict party vote is "the real, living, constitutional rule," and that "the popular limitation upon the re-eligibility of the presi dent can be taken as a constitutional limitation," found in the "unwritten constitution." So to argue is to lose sight of the basic rule. that every constitutional right in America is under the protection of the judiciary. In the chapter on Natural Rights, there is a hint at the disposition of the courts to condemn legislation which interferes with the natural rights of individuals, even when such rights are not within the specific protection of the written constitution; but no instances of such condemnation are noted. In respect to citizenship, sovereignty, and secession, certain variations in the judicial decisions are pointed out, which seem to be attributable to a diversity of views on unsettled questions of interpretation and construction, rather than to any changes in the national will. What the essayist supposes to be "a decided shifting of the position" of the Supreme Court in reference to the constitutional inhibition of legislation impairing the obligation of contracts, is presented by him as a change in the constitutional rule"; but this supposed change of judicial view many constitutional lawyers declare to be wholly imaginary.

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Two rules of American fundamental law are cited in this essay, which are enforced by the courts upon the basis of constitutional rules, and are thus entitled to be considered

as constitutional in the strict American sense, but which are not established in terms in the written constitution. These are, the rule that the courts have jurisdiction to declare a law constitutional which is in conflict with the written constitution, and the rule that in time of war the military power of the government becomes supreme of necessity. Beyond these, the "unwritten constitution" elucidated in this work is of the British rather than the American type. JAMES O. PIERCE.

BRIEFS ON NEW BOOKS.

THE Volume of "Essays on German Literature (Scribner), by Professor H. H. Boyesen, comprises six papers on Goethe, one on Schiller, two on the German novel, three on the German Romantic School, and one on "Carmen Sylva." Several of these are in almost the best style of the literary essay. In addition to his ripe and accurate German scholarship,- a point in which he yields to no other foreign critic of German literature,-Professor Boyesen brings to his task an ability to express himself clearly in terse idiomatic English, with a sense for the finer shadings and values of words, and an abstention from the stock jargon and verbal pseudoprofundities of critical exposition, that may well put to the blush many who are, in respect of the language, "to the manner born." The best chapters, perhaps, are those devoted to Goethe, the Zeus of the author's literary Pantheon; and here the English Goethe-student- a "white blackbird," the Professor thinks may profitably amend his average estimate of the poet derived from the jealous appraisals of Matthew Arnold and Edmond Scherer, the sounding periods of the hero-worshipping Carlyle, and the gushing futilities of Mr. G. H. Lewes, by reckoning in the warmly sympathetic though generally discriminating summary of Professor Boyesen. Mr. Arnold's famous essay our author regards as "the most notable English estimate of Goethe," though he is plainly a little impatient at the comparatively niggard dole of praise weighed out upon the apothecary's scales of that cautious critic. With the frigid M. Scherer (whom he styles "a malignant, disgruntled Frenchman ") Professor Boyesen is plainly exasperated; and we confess he seems to us to treat the Gallic contemner of Werther's blue coat and yellow breeches, the unsparing wielder of the critical cold-water douche, unfairly in attributing his strictures on the German. poet to his hatred of the German race. M. Scherer has, after all, accorded Goethe a measure of generous --and for him warm-praise; and his general tone toward this "one of the exceeding great among the sons of men," as he terms the poet, does not strike us as on the whole more carping than that in his essays on Milton and on Wordsworth. Upon several

points Professor Boyesen is at odds with Mr. Arnold and M. Scherer. Mr. Arnold, we remember, was of opinion that Part I. of "Faust" is "the only one that counts"; and the candid Frenchman styled its continuation (if Part II. is fairly to be considered as such) a "mere mass of symbols, hieroglyphics, and even mystifications." Professor Boyesen, on the other hand, holds that Part II. " contains the quintessence of its author's philosophy of life, the summary of his worldly wisdom"; that it is "organically coherent with the First Part and is an essential part of the grand design." If this be true, it is certainly one of the greatest mysteries, as well as misfortunes, of literature, that Goethe, a man eminently capable of the most direct lucid expression, a truth-lover who died with the words "Light! more light!" upon his lips, should have deliberately left us in darkness, in a region where effort, lacking a criterion, is ever, to adapt Kant's words, "ein blosses Herumtappen," as to the real purport of this "essential part of his grand design." We have indicated very imperfectly the scope of Professor Boyesen's critical, scholarly, and matterful volume; and can only add that the essays on the "Life and Works of Schiller," on the evolulution of the German novel, and on the social and literary aspects of the Romantic School, will prove of the greatest interest and value to American students of German literature. The book is clearly and in general correctly printed, though there are a few instances of hasty proof-reading. By a comical misprint on page 179 an oft-quoted Scotch matron is credited with aspiring to see her son one day "wag his paw in a pu'pit," an emendation probably of the thoughtful compositor.

UNDER the title "Social Statics, Abridged and Revised; and The Man versus the State," Messrs. Appleton & Co. issue a definitive edition of Herbert Spencer's much cited "Social Statics" originally published in 1850. A relinquishment of some of the views presented in the original, and the fact that certain conclusions therein set forth are inconsistent with and have led to misinterpretations of his later writings, induced Mr. Spencer in 1890 to go through the work carefully, erasing some portions, abridging others, and subjecting the whole to a thorough verbal revision. Portions of the earlier work are, therefore, now to be regarded as cancelled, a fact to be especially noted by those who find occasion to cite this book in support of their own theses. To the new volume four essays,"The New Toryism," "The Coming Slavery," "The Sins of Legislators," and "The Great Political Superstition," originally published (1884) in "The Contemporary Review," have been added under the collective title "The Man versus the State." The general trend and purpose of these papers will be readily inferred by those familiar with the author's opinions as to the nature and sphere of governments. In 1860, during the agitation for parliamentary reform, Mr. Spencer pre