_The Bessemer Steel Spectrum._--Father Secchi, who lately presented to the French Academy his fine memoir on the Stellar Spectra, compared the spectra of certain yellow stars with the spectrum produced in the Bessemer "converter" at a certain stage of the process of manufacture. The employment of the spectroscope in the preparation of this steel was begun a couple of years since; but the comparison of the Bessemer spectrum with the spectrum of the fixed stars has not, so far as we can remember, been made before. The Bessemer spectrum is best seen when the iron is completely decarbonized; it contains a great number of very fine lines, and approaches closely to the spectrum of _a_ Ononis and _a_ Herculis. The resemblance, no doubt, is due to the fact that the Bessemer flame proceeds from a great number of burning metals. The greatest importance attaches to the analogy pointed out by Father Secchi. Father Secchi suggests that beginners could not do better than practise on the Bessemer flame before turning the spectroscope on the stars. Difficult an instrument to conduct investigations with as the spectroscope undoubtedly is, the difficulty almost becomes perplexity when the student tries to examine stellar spectra.
Count Lucanor; or, The Fifty Pleasant Stories of Patronio. Written by the Prince Don Juan, A.D. 1335-1347. First done into English, from the Spanish, by James York, Doctor of Medicine, 1868: Basil Montague Pickering, Piccadilly, in the City of Westminster. For sale at the Catholic Publication House, 126 Nassau Street, New-York.
Mr. Pickering seems to revel in literary oddities. His book on the _Pilgrim's Progress_ was quaint enough, and this volume is scarcely behind it in any of its queer qualities. A more totally _foreign_ book we do not remember ever seeing. In style, idiom, turn of thought, everything, it is remote, _toto caelo_, from all the ideas and criteria of English and modern criticism. Its publication strikes us as being a remarkably bold stroke; we cannot imagine for what class of readers it could have been intended. The only market we could conceive of for such a work in this country, would be a class of Mr. George Ticknor's, if he were to have one, in Spanish archaeology. In Spanish, and as Spanish, we should think it would prove most interesting; even though the translation is intensely Iberian, both in structure and thought.