Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/773

Moslem Architecture: Its Origins and Development, by G. T. Rivoira, translated from the Italian by G. McN. Rushforth (340 illustrations, 4to, 373 pages; Oxford University Press), is a comparative study of Moslem architecture as exhibited in its religious edifices. The interest of the text is technical and archaeological, but the splendid collection of photographs with which the book is interleaved cannot help enthralling the most cursory student of architecture.

The Cossacks, by W. P. Cresson (illustrated, 8vo, 239 pages; Brentano), recounts, in the romantic mood, the history of the frontiersmen of the Czar's old empire. The book is not to be taken too seriously as a contribution to historical literature, but vivacity of style and the Wild-Western colour of the subject-matter made the pages interesting enough.

The Skilled Labourer: 1760-1832, by J. L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond (12mo, 397 pages; Longmans, Green), is the third movement in that great symphony of the Industrial Revolution which the authors have essayed to compose out of the now open files of Home Office correspondence. The martial note is predominant, for as the authors observe at the beginning "the history of England at the time discussed in these pages reads like a history of civil war," but in spite of the fascinating episode of Oliver the Spy the social and economic themes are never unduly subordinated. The result is a tragic history, greatly told.

The Flow of Value, by Logan Grant McPherson (8vo, 473 pages; Century), is an examination of prices, profits, wages, and capital along the lines traditional in commercialist economics. The categories are pre-scientific abstractions, like Utility; and the descriptions of processes, in spite of the author's wide experience in railroad transportation, are consistently hypothetical. The book is not so much a fresh contribution to economics as an illumination of the possibilities of that "new reservation of time" which William Jewett Tucker has pointed out as the crown of a busy administrator's career.