It's striking that previous reviewers belong to two distinct camps. To some, this little book appears to be an elementary introduction to familiar physics -- even, to "Newtonian physics". Others recognize it for what I believe it is: a beautiful and elegant introduction to a new view of the physical world very different from Newton's. To express his theory of electromagnetic field and the holistic view of nature it demanded, he had found his way to the Lagrangian formulation, based not on the individual forces of Newton, but on the energy of whole systems. Individual elements are derived, if at all, only abstractly by way of generalized coordinates. This little volume restates the elements of this new view elegantly without its analytic mathematics. For more about this turning point in Maxwell's work see my study of its role in the Treatise. Figures of Thought. I spell out this view of Matter and Motion in an article reprinted on my website thomasksimpson.com -- look under the heading "articles".
For a beautiful exposition of the Lagrangian view and its foundation in the Principle of Least Action, see Cornelius Lanczos The Variational Principles of Mechanics (Dover Books on Physics and Chemistry).