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92 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION when it was necessary for Queen Victoria herself to undergo an operation, and -tyhen she selected Lister to perform it, which he did with complete success, the recognition of his theory by the medical world was assured. The function of a biography is to interpret the life and works of the hero, and in the book here being reviewed the author has stressed both phases equally. In it the reader can learn much of Lister's home life (he was one of seven children), of the friendship of the Lister and Gurney families, of Agnes Syme whom Joseph Lister married and with whom he traveled extensively on the continent to meet the leading physicians of Europe. The Syme family were not Friends, and Joseph expected to be disowned for marrying out of Meeting. On this point the author does not enlighten us, although in other biographies of Lister it is stated that he resigned from Friends and became a member of the Episcopal Church. Except for such slight defects this is a scholarly essay, and it is well worthy of a place in any collection of biographies, whether of medical men or of Friends. Joshua L. Baily, Jr. San Diego, California William Penn. Fruits of an Active Life. Remarks upon Religion, Morals, Government, Toleration. Selected with an Introduction by William Wistar Comfort. William Penn, Practical Mystic, by Isaac Sharpless: with Further Selections from the Works of Penn. Philadelphia, Friends Book Store and Friends Central Bureau, 1945. 102 pp. $1. THIS very satisfactory and attractive little volume is, of course, a counterpart of William Penn's Fruits of Solitude, put together as máximas in his own lifetime. The Solitude has long been a classic among people of many types and diverse callings, entirely apart from the Society of Friends. Novy we have Fruits of an Active Life, very much in the same form of maxims and proverbs as the former work, but in this case collated and atranged by William Wistar Comfort, President Emeritus of Haverford College. It is evidently another one of the mature results of Dr. Comfort's former masterly life of William Penn, published in the Tercentenary year. These new maxims cover the four headings of Religion, Morals, Government, and Toleration. In each instance, a little independent paragraph is identified by initials with its source from Penn's voluminous published works. As Dr. Comfort says in his introduction, they follow a literary form, more popular in Penn's time than it is today, of philosophical or religious meditations in brief. They are tender, inspiring or hortatory, as the case may require. At any time and for any mood they constitute a valuable little book for the casual reader or philosopher. The value of the book is greatly enhanced by Dr. Comfort's modest introduction of five pages, and by the essay on "William Penn, Practical Vol. 34, Autumn 1945 BOOK REVIEWS93 Mystic,'* by former President Sharpless. This essay in itself is of great charm and value and is new to most American readers. We are told that it was used in a book published in 1909 in London by Headley Brothers, in "The Religion of Life Series," Selections from the Works of William Penn, very few copies of which apparently came to America. The maxims avoid most successfully the tedium of much of what Penn wrote. They also constitute a most satisfying résumé of some of the choicest thoughts that Penn gave the world, thoughts which still remain abreast of the times. We are indebted once again to Dr. Comfort for this new evidence of his ripe scholarship. Francis R. Taylor Cheltenham, Pennsylvania Philadelphia: Holy Experiment, by Struthers Burt. Garden City, New York, Doubleday, Doran and Company, Inc., 1945. 396 pp. $3.75. PROBABLY no one except the antiquarian now reads garrulous old Watson's Annals of Philadelphia or Scharf and Westcott's monumental (I had almost said mausolean) History of Philadelphia. One is therefore grateful to Struthers Burt for using his gifts as a novelist to tell the life^story of Penn's "green countrie towne." He modestly protests that he has not written a history but rather "a...

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