NOTES ON BOOKS, SALES, CATALOGUES, ETC.

If any doubt could exist as to the value of the Germania of Tacitus, as an invaluable contribution to the history of all the Teutonic races, a glance at the Appendix to Klemm's Germanische Altherthumskunde, in which that author has enumerated not only the best editions and translations of the Germania, but also the most important dissertations to which it has given rise, would at once dispel it. The scholar and the antiquary of this country may therefore be congratulated on the fact of Dr. Latham having prepared an edition of it, which has been issued under the title of The Germania of Tacitus, with Ethnological Dissertations and Notes. Although "the work," to use Dr. Latham's own words, "is rather a commentary upon the geographical part of the Germania, than on the Germania itself—the purely descriptive part relating to the customs of the early Germans being passed over almost sicco pede ,"—yet our readers will have no difficulty in estimating its importance, when we inform them that the Ethnological Dissertations and Notes which accompany the text may be said to embody the views, (ofttimes indeed dissented from by Dr. Latham,) of Grimm and Zeuss, and the learning with which those distinguished men have illustrated the subject. Indeed, Dr. Latham, who sets an example of openly acknowledging his obligations to other scholars which we should be glad to see more generally followed, expressly states, that whether the work before us took its present form, or that of a translation with an elaborate commentary of Zeuss's learned and indispensable work, Die Deutschen und die Nachbarstämme, was a mere question of convenience.

If the story that we have heard be true, namely, that one of the most learned and active members of the episcopal bench did, at a late clerical meeting, hold up a copy of Whitaker's Clergyman's Diary and Ecclesiastical Directory, and pronounce it to be a little book so full of useful and invaluable information as to be indispensable to every clergyman, it is clear that the work is beyond all criticism.

The Family Almanack and Educational Register for 1852, contains—in addition to full particulars of nearly a thousand public schools, colleges, and universities, and a list (containing upwards of a thousand) of the principal private schools in the kingdom,—a vast amount of miscellaneous information (including for the first time the Statutes of the Irish University) and statistical tables, and so forms a volume which no person interested in the great question of education can at all do without.

While on the subject of education, we may acknowledge the receipt of several educational works, which we can only notice with great brevity.

M. Merlet's Dictionary of French Difficulties (which, but that the subject is almost too grave for such a jest, we should have suggested might very appropriately have been dedicated to the President) bears on its title the stamp of its merit in the words "third edition."

M. Falch Lebahn's Self Instructor in German; Practice in German; and German in One Volume (4th ed.), are very able attempts to facilitate the study of that most useful language.

The last work, containing as it does La Motte Fouque's beautiful tale of Undine, with explanatory notes on all the difficult words and phrases, and its vocabulary of 4500 words synonymous in German and English, cannot be found otherwise than most useful.