NEW BOOKS.

ECONOMY OF MACHINERY AND MANUFACTURES.


The volume lately published by Mr. Babbage, with the above title, is,
without exception, one of the most practical works ever produced in this
or any other country. To our minds, it is beyond all price, and, as
illustrating the arts of life and society, it is, to use a very homely
phrase, worth its weight in gold. The proposition may be a whimsical one,
but we doubt whether a mass of gold, of the same dimensions as Mr.
Babbage's volume, could be made to diffuse more happiness and real
enjoyment than the right understanding and application of the principles
illustrated in its pages. Theory and practice, proposition and proof, go
hand in hand through every chapter; and all this has been done in such
concise language, and with such avoidance of technical terms as to be
intelligible to readers of any grade. The author is a professor of
mathematics at Cambridge, but his honours are not vaunted in fine
unintelligibilities: he writes of common things in a common way, and not,
like Hudibras, who told the clock by algebra, or, like the lady in Dr.
Young's Satires, who drank tea by stratagem. Would that all professors had
written in the same vein. Then, learning would not have been so mixed up
with the mysticism of the cell and the cloister, nor the evils of
ignorance have so long retarded the happiness of mankind: for, "learning,"
observes one of the greatest moralists of his day, "once made popular is
no longer learning; it has the appearance of something which we have
bestowed upon ourselves, as the dew appears to rise from the field which
it refreshes."