The Missions to Seamen.

" At the Sign of the Fly ing Angel." By G. A. Gollock. (Longmans, Green & Co. 5s. net.) IT was 107 years ago that Sir William Hillary, in his Life-boat Appeal, wrote of our seamen that " for ages they have been the acknowledged support of our splendour and power," and that " we shall be wanting in our best duties to them, to our country and to ourselves " until we do everything possible for their safety. Miss Gollock's very interesting book is the story of one of the many agencies—the Church of England's Mis- sions to Seamen—by which, during the past 100 years, the country has slowly but increasingly fulfilled its duty to its seamen, of whQm there are now in the sea- going mercantile marine about 200,000.

She describes the conditions under which they lived ashore and afloat 100 years ago, when there was certainly nothing in their lives to make them realize that they had anything to do with the " splendour and power" of Great Britain. She gives an account of the crimping and robbery in the days when, in San Francisco alone, those who preyed on the sailor got from him, £40,000 or £50,000 a year of his wages.

She traces the growth of the Mission to Seamen, which began with the work of one man in the Bristol Channel in 1835, became a Society in 1856, and now has 113 stations and 161 churches and institutes all over the world, from Vancouver and Valparaiso to Kobe and Auckland. Finally, she gives some account of the men who have done the work of the Missions, men who have had to be seamen as well as chaplains, and as ready with their hands as their tongues. Of the names she mentions among the workers for the Missions, two will be very familiar to readers of The Lifeboat. One is Lieut.-Commander Gartside-Tipping, R.N., for many years a member of the Committee of the Missions to Seamen, who had been a District Inspector of Life-boats, and then a member of the Committee of Management of the Institution. He volunteered for active service in 1914, at the age of sixty-six, and was killed in action. The other is the Rev. T.

Stanley Treanor, for many years Chap- lain of the Missions to Seamen in the Downs, Honorary Secretary at the same time of the Institution's Deal Branch, and the author of " Heroes of the Goodwin Sands." It has been well said of the Institution and the Missions to Seamen that one rescues the sailor from the dangers of the sea and the other from the dangers of the land.

Pioneers of Progress.

" Pioneers of Progress : Stories of Social History, 1750-1920." By C. S. S. Higham. (Longmans, Green & Co. 2s. 6d. net.) Mr. Higham's aim has been to tell very briefly and simply the stories of the most important social changes of the last two centuries. The freeing of the slaves, the reform of the prisons, the development of the roads, the build- ing of lighthouses, the establishment of the Police Force, penny postage, the Factory Acts, hospital nursing and, last, but not least, the establishment of the Life-boat Service are among the great social and humanitarian achievements about which he writes. In his Life- boat Chapter (illustrated with a portrait of Sir William Hillary, while the first Life-boat, the Original, provides the frontispiece to the book) he has admir- ably carried out his aim of giving a short and simple account which yet includes the principal events in the founding of the Institution and its development during more than a cen- tury. Its concluding paragraph is in itself so excellent and true a summary of the history of the Service and of the men associated with it, that we must quote it in full:— " As we come to the end of our story we can picture to ourselves the chain of Life-boat Stations all round the coast.

. . . We see the crews, fisherfolk and boatmen, always ready to venture their lives when the signal goes. And there passes before us a great pageant of those who have made the Service.

Lukin the coach-builder and Wouldhave the painter, who designed the early boats ; Henry Greathead and Thomas Beeching, the famous boat-builders; Sir William Hillary, the founder, who actually saved more than three hundred lives as a member of a Life-boat's Crew himself. But, finest of all, is the endless stream of sturdy Coxswains and their gallant Crews, the nameless heroes of the bravest service in the world.".