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BOOK NOTICES.

DARWIN'S GREAT WORK.—The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication. By Charles Darwin. Authorized edition, with a Preface to the American edition by the Author, and one by Professor Asa Gray, of Cambridge, Mass. New York: Orange Judd & Co.

This is the republication of an English edition of a work the value whereof it is difficult to estimate in words sufficiently expressive.

The first English edition, it is said, was exhausted in a week, and the publishers of this, awake to the wants of the American people, secured the author's revision, with new and additional notes, making it the most complete as well as the most remarkable collection of facts concerning our domestic animals and plants yet brought together.

Written in admirable English, using no scientific terms but such as are comprehensible to men of fair education, lucidly arranged, and indexed with scrupulous care, there is not an agriculturist or horticulturist in the country who has any taste for the history or theory of his calling but will peruse it with pleasure and profit, and find it difficult to say whether he values it more as a storehouse of facts or as an incitement to observe and to think.

Let the reader be of the learned professions, or a child or novice in all that pertains to natural history, they will find in this book food for thought and instruction, knowledge of animal and vegetable life, their origin and perpetuation in a healthy or unhealthy condition, and so mingled with anecdotes, observations, and originality, that its study will be a pleasure to every intelligent mind.

The work is finely illustrated, and published in two volumes of over 500 pages each. Price, $6.