AP4

63

Wil 84

INDIANA UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

LONDON: J. B. NICHOLS AND SON, PRINTERS, 25, PARLIAMENT STREET.

02-1-8

PREFACE.

It will afford us much pleasure if we can feel assured that since we last addressed our readers our efforts to fulfil the engagements into which we have entered have been attended with their usual success. We are quite aware that we have many rivals for the public favour, and not a year passes without some fresh endeavour made to propitiate it by promises of executing in a better form what had been previously attempted, or of opening a new and wider channel for the circulation of knowledge. But whether these promised advantages are secured or not, we feel little affected by their failure or success; for so great is the increased production of the Press, that we are every day hearing complaints that it is impossible for any ordinary exertion of industry to keep pace with it, and that curiosity literally wants time for its rational gratification. This is a course of things that naturally takes place as society becomes better educated and more refined, and the coarse and vulgar amusements of a former age are superseded by the tranquil pleasures of mental cultivation, of intellectual intercourse, and social improvement. Where a century ago there was one reader, there are now a hundred. The demand and the supply act and re-act upon each other, and the whole field of Literature is thus waving with fresh harvests of knowledge in endless succession. It is here we think that publications like our own will be found useful, and often necessary, sometimes in drawing attention to those particular portions of new works that most deserve it, and sometimes in giving, in a brief and condensed form, an outline of the whole. What we have said of books is equally applicable to all branches of knowledge appearing in any other form; and we have therefore no doubt but that, however numerous Reviews or Magazines and works of a similar nature may be, they will not want success if they shew them