ALUMNI PUBLICATIONS

Fifty Two Story Talks to Boys andGirls: HOWARD J. CHIDLEY, '06, New York. George H. Doran Company.

Mr. Chidley's book is one evidence of a very quiet but a very significant movement which, for some time past, has.been gathering intensity and strength within the churches. If we must yield to the present-day penchant for names and titles, the movement might be styled "The Children's Church Movement." It seeks to accord to children, who are the natural feeders of the church, a place in the church as it assembles, and a part in the doings of the church when assembled. The raison d'etre of the movement has now been expounded in a number of able treatises; and the general experience of churches, in which one or more plans of incorporating children into leading services designed principally for adults have been thoroughly tried, has been that of satisfaction.

But if the answer to the large question: Ought children to be in church? is becoming more and more unitedly an affirmative one, the answer to the question: What is to be done with children when they are gotten to church? is still in the confines of riddle. Nor does Mr. Chidley's book completely unriddle it. The book is more suggestive than final. It is pioneering of a high order; but it is pioneering. The book calls up the query whether the time has not come for a study of the question of the relation of children to church from every conceivable angle of observation, and a summarizing of the results of such a study in conveyable form. It may perhaps be hinted here that the study spoken o.f could be much more straight-forwardly conducted if the churches knew what they are about in the whole field of religious education. Do we sufficiently know the purpose of a church school? Are we, to particularize for a sentence, trying in church Schools, to secure church members, to bring into life admirers and devotees of Jesus Christ, to make servants of men and society, to build up a race of adepts in the estimation of moral values, or to create reverent souls ?

Judgment of Mr. Chidley's book in the realm of final solutions, however, would be grossly unfair. The frank purport of the book is the relation of a bit of successful experience. Mr. Chidley speaks to children every Sunday morning, in the Trinity Congregational Church, of East Orange, New Jersey. He has given us here fifty-two stories used on such occasions. That the occasions have been fascinating, as well for grown-ups as for children, is obvious from the racy quality in the stories themselves, and from the refined cleverness with which their teaching is driven home to juvenile hearers. All whose work brings a realization of the difficulty of fixing, fruitfully, the attention of children, will have abundant experience of pleasure in either random or sustained perusal of Fifty Two StoryTalks.

R. C. FALCONER

The Refugees of 1776 from LongIsland to Connecticut, by FREDERIC GREGORY MATHER, 1867. Albany, N. Y J. B. Lyon Company, Printers, 1913, pp. 1204.

This bulky and, , at first sight, portentous volume, weighing nearly five and one half pounds, is not intended as light reading, or as a companion of a leisure hour, but it is a monument to the historical zeal and industry of its author and it will be invaluable as a mine for reference to any who are interested in its main topic or in many related .subjects.

""At the outbreak of the Revolution Long Island was occupied largely by adherents of the patriotic cause, and after the Island passed under the control of the British as the result of the battle of Long Island in 1776, these inhabitants were forced to come into the power of the enemy or to abandon their possessions and homes for places under patriot control. Most of them took the latter course and fled from the Island to Connecticut, though some went to other districts.

The number of these refugees was about 5,000, out of a population of perhaps 30,000 (p. 187), and the record of their names, given in this volume has been unearthed by Mr. Mather, who with extraordinary earnestness and acumen hunted for them in the moldering archives of New York and Connecticut. It is fortunate for the preservation of the record that he was minded to make the search when he did, for the "fifty two folio volumes of 'Revolutionary Manuscripts' " which he had brought together, from the scattered papers in the New York collection, and from which a large part of the records printed in this book was taken, were lost, together with a card index to the volumes, in the fire that destroyed a part of the New York State library building on March 29, 1911.

The examination of the New York records was supplemented by that of the records in the State Library and the Historical Society of Connecticut, as well as by that of the records of many towns and parishes, and of family records and of publications bearing on the times. The result is an extraordinary amount of historical and biographical information relating to the refugees that will form the basis for more popular works. From the nature of the case some of the genealogies are fragmentary, pieced together from manysources, but the wonder is that they could have been obtained at all.

The character of the book is well indicated by the table of contents. Part one, which is historical, gives eighty-four pages to a short story of the Revolutionary War, with special reference to the events on Long Island, fifty-four pages to an account of the military and civic service and one hundred pages to the effects of the battle of Long Island and to the refugees. A second part of four hundred and fifty-three pages gives the biographical account of the refugees, and this is followed by four hundred pages mainly of documents transcribed from the journals of the New York and Connecticut Provincial Assemblies and Councils of Safety, of accounts and records of the military service of the refugees and of miscellaneous papers. An index of nearly 20,000 names adds greatly to the serviceableness of the book.

Attractiveness is added to the volume by nearly nine hundred illustrations, consisting of reproductions of portraits and autographs, of fac-similes of documents, of views of places and houses, and of maps, plans and diagrams.

No one who has not burrowed among old records and attempted to recover, with accuracy of detail, such facts as are given in this book, can have any idea of the painstaking care which it represents. Personal and intelligent research, judicious direction of subordinates, and voluminous correspondence were necessary for its preparation. The author is to be congratuated on his work.

JOHN K. LORD

Frederick Warren Jenkins '00 together with Eizabeth L. Black is the author of "Emergency Relief, a Selected Biography" published by the Russell Sage Foundation.

System for October, 1914, contains "Theodore N. Vail and his Organization for Getting at Facts and Figures to Help Establish Policies" by Kendall Banning '02.

Dr. Charles A. Eastman '89 contributes "The Indian's Health Problem" to the January number of PopularScience Monthly.

"Tuck Drive, the New Approach to Dartmouth College," by H. C. Hill '02, appears in the January number of the Highway Contractor and Road Builder. Joseph W. Manion '00 is business and advertising manager of this magazine.

Gabriel Farrell, Jr., '11, is the author of "A Town Manager under a Town-Meeting Charter" in the January number of The American City. He also had an article entitled "The City Manager in. the Bay State" in the November number of the Town DevelopmentMagazine.

"Genetic Studies on a Cavy Species Cross," by J. A. Detlefsen 'OB, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Publication No. 205. "The research problem, covering a period of six years, is very fully treated in one hundred and fifty pages with colored plate, forty-seven figures! and eighty-one tables. It is the first Genetic study on a species cross in mammals, and deals with the inheritance of color and coat characters, size growth, and morphological characters, and the fertility and sterility in such crosses. It is shown that sterility between species, one of the most rigid of criteria of specific differences, is due to multiple factors (probably eight), transmitted according to a definite law. Over 2600 animals enter into these experiments, the funds being furnished by the Carnegie Institute of Washington. Most of the data were analyzed, and the book was written, at the College of Agriculture,—From Univ. ofIllinois Daily.