Extracts from the PREFACE:

The volume of which the following pages are a translation, has beenadopted by the University Commission at Paris among their prizebooks, and has reached an eighth edition. Perhaps these facts speak sufficiently in its favor; but as translator, and to some extent editor,I wish to add my testimony to the great charm as well as merit of the little work. I sat down to it, I must own, with no special predilectionin favor of the subject as a suitable one for young people; but in the course of the labor have become a thorough convert to the author's views that such a study--perhaps I ought to add, so pursued as he has enabled it to be--is likely to prove a most useful and most desirable one.á

The precise age at which the interest of a young mind can be turnedtowards this practical branch of natural history is an open question,and not worth disputing about. It may vary even in differentindividuals. The letters are addressed to a child--in the originaleven to a little girl--and most undoubtedly, as the book stands, it isfit for any child's perusal who can find amusement in its pages: while to the rather older readers, of whom I trust there will be a great many, I will venture to say that the advantage they will gain in the subject having been so treated as to be brought within the comprehension and adapted to the tastes of a child, is pretty nearly incalculable.

The quaintness and drollery of the illustrations with which difficult scientific facts are set forth will provoke many a smile, no doubt, andin some young people perhaps a tendency to feel themselves treated babyishly; but if in the course of the babyish treatment they find themselves almost unexpectedly becoming masters of an amount of valuable information on very difficult subjects, they will have nothing to complain of. Let such young readers refer to even a popular Encyclopaedia for an insight into any of the subjects of the twenty-eight chapters of this volume--"The Heart," "The Lungs," "The Stomach," "Atmospheric Pressure,"--no matter which, and see how much they can understand of it without an amount of preliminary instruction which would require half-a-year's study, and they will then thoroughly appreciate the quite marvellous ingenuity and beautiful skill with which M. Mac? has brought the great leading anatomical and physical facts of life out of the depths of scientific learning, and made them literally comprehensible by a child.