11. The Swedish Academy awarded the reserved Nobel Prize for Literature for 1925 to Mr. George Bernard Shaw.

12. A Royal Charter of Incorporation was granted to the Imperial College for Tropical Agriculture.

15. Luton celebrated the Jubilee of its incorporation as a borough.

17. The Rt. Rev. Cyril Charles Bowman Bardsley, Lord Bishop of Peterborough, was appointed first Bishop of the new Diocese of Leicester.

26. At the by-election at Central Hull, Lt.-Comdr. J. M. Kenworthy obtained the seat for the Labour Party by a greatly increased majority.

Prof. H. J. W. Hetherington, Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow, was elected Vice-Chancellor of the University of Liverpool.

30. The rainfall in November (5-20 inches at Kew Observatory) was the heaviest since 1852.

DECEMBER.

1. At the Chelmsford by-election, Lt.-Col. C. K. Howard-Bury retained the seat for the Conservatives by a slightly reduced majority.

4. The Times announced that Dr. Herbert, Bishop Suffragan of Kingston, was appointed Bishop of the new Diocese of Blackburn.

-

50th anniversary of the formation of the International Sleeping Car Co.

9. Dr. W. Essex Wynter, formerly senior physician of the Middlesex Hospital, presented Bartholomew Manor, Newbury, in Berkshire, together with sixteen sixteenth-century cottages to be used as a home for retired sisters and nurses of the staff of the hospital.

15. Mr. David Emrys Evans, Professor of Classics at Swansea University College, was appointed Principal of University College of North Wales, in succession to Sir Harry Reichel.

21. At the by-election at Smethwick, Mr. Oswald Mosley retained the seat for the Labour Party by a majority of 6,582, as compared with the Labour majority of 1,253 in the 1924 election.

The Venerable D. L. Prosser, Archdeacon of St. David's, was elected Bishop of St. David's in succession to the late Bishop Owen.

24. The total number of persons on the registers of Employment Exchanges in Great Britain was 1,351,000, being an increase of 41,261 over the previous week.

31. Sir Gilbert Wills presented 50,000l. to Guy's Hospital.

31. During the year the Southern Railway carried 2,000,577 passengers to the Continent-a record figure.

In the London area 517,680 telephones had been installed, as compared with 475,780 at the end of 1925 (see under July 16).

Less sunshine was recorded at the Rothamsted Experimental Station during 1926 than in any previous year: the total amount being 1,336-6 hours as compared with 1,563-2 hours, a year's average.

The total amount of rainfall was 3 per cent. in excess of the average.

RETROSPECT

OF

LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART IN 1926.

LITERATURE.

(Books marked with an asterisk are specially noticed at the end of this section.) THE following analysis of books published in the United Kingdom during 1926 is taken from the Publishers' Circular, by kind permission of the Editor, Mr. R. J. Marston. The total output was less than that of 1925 by 403, but in view of the economic conditions of the year it is remarkable that the number of books published should be the second highest yet recorded.

CLASSIFIED ANALYSIS OF BOOKS PUBLISHED DURING THE YEAR 1926.

The following may be singled out as among the most noteworthy additions to the list of periodicals: The Journal of Philosophic Studies, edited by Mr. Sydney E. Hooper and other members of the new Institute, was a quarterly intended to appeal to everyone interested in the subject, whether layman or expert; the Quarterly Review of Biology, published from Baltimore, U.S.A., was evidently launched with the view of doing similar work in its own field, but the task had clearly been much more difficult; the Medieval Academy of America issued the first number of Speculum, a journal of medieval studies, with the support of a number of English scholars; The New Criterion was an enlarged form of perhaps the most eclectic literary quarterly of post-war days, under the editorship of Mr. T. S. Eliot; Philology was represented by Word-Lore, a magazine dealing with folk-song, folk-lore, dances, and names, and Scottish Gaelic Studies, issued from the Celtic Department of the University of Aberdeen, which defended Gaelic as spoken in Scotland from the reproach of being a debased form of Irish.

A great deal of distinguished work in all branches of literature saw the light during 1926, and most contemporary authors of repute presented new volumes. The economic tempests of the year evidently did no harm to the harvest of fiction, and it is doubtful if they were really responsible for the falling-off in the matter of reprints. The book trade seemed, indeed, to be exceptionally prosperous; and the publishers even survived the disclosure of the secrets of their calling by one of their number, Mr. Stanley Unwin, in The Truth About Publishing.

Among the biographies of the year must be mentioned Mr. Shane Leslie's George the Fourth, in which the author strove to contest Thackeray's verdict on that monarch. Mr. Carl Sandburg's two volumes, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, were devoted to the "long Abe" of Springfield days, and his whole queer personal and social environment. Woodrow Wilson and Calvin Coolidge: the Man who is President, both by Mr. William Allen White, were effective works of smaller calibre. British statesmen were the central figures of several attractive works. Mr. Philip Guedalla's Palmerston was a piece of characteristic narrative and a contribution to political history made all the more valuable by its verve and polish. The Rt. Hon. Sir Edward Clarke, K.C., confined himself mainly to the political aspect of the period of which he is one of the few survivors in his concise, yet dramatic, Benjamin Disraeli: The Romance of a Great Career (18041881). Further evidence of the revival of interest in Parnell was afforded by two new works: Parnell: The Last Five Years, told "from within" by Sir Alfred Robbins, and The Parnell of Real Life, by his faithful lieutenant, Mr. William O'Brien. The latter made some points against Mr. St. John Ervine's study of the Irish leader, published last year, and put the blame for the mischief-making round the O'Shea suit on the shoulders of Lord Morley; Sir Alfred Robbins was less of a partisan, and decided that Parnell's personality and actions could not be explained by ordinary formulas. The two massive volumes of Mr. Piaras Béaslai's Michael Collins and the Making of a New Ireland had considerable historical value, but they failed as a biography through their lack of that chivalry towards

the enemy which was so fine a part of the nature of Collins. Books on administrators and diplomats included Raffles, 1781-1820, by Professor R. Coupland, the inspiring story of the founder of Singapore and of the Zoological Gardens, and The Right Honourable Sir Mortimer Durand, by Brigadier-General Sir Percy Sykes, the life of a brilliant and devoted public official and a man of rare charm and versatility. Among collections of biographical material there stood out Mr. E. Thornton Cook's vivid portraits of our Queens from 1066 to 1910 in Her Majesty; Mr. Philip Guedalla's Independence Day: A Sketchbook, a series of lively portraits of the Englishmen and Americans (not to mention Louis XVI.) who brought into being the United States of America; Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women, by Mrs. Julia Margaret Cameron, which takes its place in this section by right of Mrs. Virginia Woolf's account of the prodigious, inexhaustible woman who showed such astonishing artistry with the camera; and Mr. A. G. Gardiner's portraits of personalities of to-day-Mr. Churchill, Mr. Amery, Dean Inge, Jack Hobbs, Charlie Chaplin in Certain People of Importance.

In Fourteen English Judges the Earl of Birkenhead added to the value of biographical studies ranging from Bacon to Halsbury by including notes of the chief legal decisions each Judge contributed to English law. Mr. R. Macnair Wilson's The Beloved Physician: Sir James Mackenzie, was an arresting account of the achievements and the human qualities of a figure that does not come far short of the heroic, and the services of two noble women to medicine and science were commemorated in Lord Riddell's Dame Louisa Aldrich-Blake and Miss Evelyn Sharp's Hertha Ayrton. Affectionate tributes to departed scholars of the two great Universities were paid in James Leigh Strachan-Davidson, Master of Balliol, by Professor J. W. Mackail and others, and Henry Jackson, O.M., by Dr. R. St. John Parry. Biographies and critical studies of literary men were plentiful, and of a high standard. The " great twin brethren were linked once more in Mr. Frederic T. Blanchard's Fielding the Novelist-a bulky collection of what must be nearly all that has ever been said of Fielding and his works from his own day to the present, with a running commentary-and Mr. Lewis Melville's Life and Letters of Tobias Smollett (1721-1771). The Life of William Godwin, by Mr. Ford K. Brown, was excellent in execution, though not convincing as an essay in rehabilitation. Mr. Hugh I'Anson Fausset displayed unusual sympathy and understanding in the elaborate portrait presented in his * Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mr. H. W. Garrod discussed the poet's misjudgment of his own gifts in his *Keats. In Samuel Butler and his Family Relations, Mrs. R. S. Garnett made a curiously ineffectual attempt to defend Butler's family, his father in particular, against the imputations of The Way of All Flesh.

The new volumes of the series of English Men of Letters, edited by Mr. J. C. Squire, were the work of members of the younger school of critics, and included Mr. J. B. Priestley's George Meredith, which emphasised the duality of the man and the writer; Mr. Harold Nicolson's Swinburne, in which the theory of arrested development was driven rather too far; Herman Melville, by Mr. John Freeman, the first English book on that