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The scheme he would advocate, however, is not the present one of temporary stay and a free return passage at the expiration of a given time, but one of colonization and residency. He has perfect confidence in the English safe guards against imposition and tyranny, and believes that a Coolie peasantry may be made to grow up side by side, and on peaceable terms, with the native Creoles.

Mr. Sewell, so far as we have discovered, nowhere alludes to the means employed in India to induce the Coolie to emigrate, and for aught we know they may be alike honorable to the shipper and the shipped, but we expect to shew in these pages before long, that Coolie emigration, as carried on in China, is a species of barbarity to which the African slave trade hardly need blush to be compared. Yet all that Mr. Sewell has said in praise of the East Indian and English scheme may be true; it may be both honorable and philanthrophic.

ADVENTURES IN EQUATORIAL AFRICA.*-No one of the now numerous volumes of travel and discovery in Africa, published by the Harper's, can be compared with this of M. Du Chaillu, for marvellousness of contents. It was an unvisited region that he entered upon, and there was reason to expect that we should hear of vegetable and animal productions before unknown, as well as of strange tribes and regions. But M. Du Chaillu has taken the public by surprise. The number and kind of his discoveries seem almost incredible. He brought home over two thousand stuffed birds which he had shot, more than eighty skeletons, with two hundred stuffed skins of quadrupeds he had killed, not less than twenty of which are species hitherto unknown to science.

M. Du Chaillu entered on his travels with unusual advantages. A former residence of several years on the coast of Africa, where his father had a factory, had not only given him acquaintance with the languages and customs of the coast natives, it had inured him to the climate, and made him acquainted with the best methods of preserving life and health. When, therefore, he left this country for the Western Coast of Equatorial Africa, in October, 1855, it was with high and reasonable hopes of important discoveries. During the four years of

*

Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa; with accounts of the Manners and Customs of the People, and of the chase of the Gorilla, the Crocodile, Leopard, Elephant, Hippopotamus, and other animals. By PAUL B. DU CHAILLU, Corresponding member of the American Ethnological Society, of the Geographical and Statistical Society of New York, and of the Boston Society of Natural History. With numerous illustrations. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1861.

his explorations, he travelled-always on foot and without a white companion about 8,000 miles, suffered fifty attacks of the African fever, and took, "to cure himself, over fourteen ounces of quinine."

The great feature of the book is the fulness and accuracy of its information about that frightful monster, the gorilla, an ape whose existence was not made certain to men of science till 1847, and has even since been regarded by many as uncertain. M. Du Chaillu, by the skele tons and crania brought home by him, of which he gives diagrams and measurements in his volume, has set the question at rest with all minds. It is fitting that the back of his book, and the first page to which we open, should greet the reader with a full length figure of this hideous and man-like monster. Its form is perpetually flitting across the pages of the narrative. The author dwells also with some degree of minuteness on several other species of apes peculiar to the region he explored, as the chimpanzee, the nshiego mbouve, a new species discovered by him, and the kooloo-kamba, whose face and head have a painfully and astonishingly human-like look. Our traveller is decided, however, in ascribing a much greater resemblance to the human form as a whole, in the gorilla than in either of the other apes, and equally so in maintaining the existence of a "vast chasm between even the most inferior forms of the human race and the most superior of the apes."

The value of the volume for ethonological and scientific purposes, is by no means inconsiderable, while as a narrative of travel and adventure its attractiveness to general readers is unsurpassed. It is only to be regretted that the author had not avoided needless repetitions, and been a little more observant of the order of time and place in grouping the particulars of his story. As it is, there is in it a sad lack of verisimilitude. There seem to be too many fortunate occurrences happening at precisely the right time, too many astonishing escapes, too many wonderfully good shots. Our faith is sorely enough tried by what he has written, without a gratuitous taxing by confusion of times, places, and circumstances. We are out of patience with the author when, in one part of the volume, we come upon an occurrence or fact which we think he has before described, but which we find on comparson to be accompanied with such diversity of circumstance, as to leave us in doubt as to the identity. Nor has his fistic argument in defence of the truth of his own narrative to a London doubter, prepared his readers to be over credulous. Perhaps, however, all may be explained on the theory of noble negligence and an ardent temperament.

SEASONS WITH THE SEA-HORSES.*-The Arctic regions have not hitherto been regarded as an inviting field to the sportsman. It was in August, 1858, that Mr. Lamont, a professional sportsman and traveller, while cruising leisurely in his yacht on the coast of Norway, heard of the game to be found in Spitzbergen, and made a hasty trip to that country. He arrived there so late in the season as to have little more than opportunity to see that, "wonderful sport, and of a most original description," awaited any one who should be there at the right time, and properly furnished with boats and men. Accordingly in the following spring he wrote to Hammerfest in Norway for a vessel and boats to be in readiness for him, suitable in construction and equipments for hunting the walrus and the seal along the coast of Spitzbergen. A brother sportsman and traveller, Lord David Kennedy, who like himself had used the rifle with great success on the game of the tropics, joined him, and by the 7th of July they were amid the ice and the walruses.

Nothing could be more perfectly in contrast with hunting in Africa, so often described of late, than the pursuit of walruses and seals and polar bears, amid the floating ice of the North, Variety of incident and excitement is decidedly on the side of the former. One would also think that the very few weeks of mid-summer must be quite sufficient to sate the taste of the sportsman for the latter. But Mr Lamont, as well as his companion, pursued his game with unflagging interest to the very close of the season, especially the reindeer, of which near the close he took large numbers; he has also told the story of his pursuit in a style so straight forward and frank, and good-humored, that the reader follows on without wavering to the end.

The author contributes numerous facts, and brought home various fossils and specimens, which are of value to the science of Geology. He dedicates his work to Sir Charles Lyell.

He ventures, also, a most emphatic declaration of his faith in the "theory of progressive development, first suggested by the illustrious Lamarck, and since so ably expounded and defended, under somewhat modified forms, by the author of the Vestiges of Creation, and by Mr. Charles Darwin." Mr. Darwin "can see no difficulty” in the conjecture that whales were originally a race of bears that became

* Seasons with the Sea-Horses; or Sporting Adventures in the Northern Seas. By JAMES LAMONT, Esq., F. G. S. New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, Franklin Square. 1861.

aquatic in their tastes and structure by taking to the water in search of food; and Mr. Lamont, with the emphasis of italics, can see no difficulty in it either," but proposes in corroboration of the theory the following solution of the origin of the walrus:

may

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"Suppose, then, the case of a bear (or any other large land animal, existing or extinct) living on the borders of the then existing Polar We can easily fancy that in the struggle for existence perpetually going on, this bear-or whatever he was have been compelled to take to the sea-shore and prey upon shell-fish, among other things. At first he would only go into shallow water, but he would become emboldened, by success and habit, to go deeper and deeper; even in the lifetime of one individual this would happen, and he would acquire the habit of digging shells up with his feet or his teeth - at first probably with his feet, but latterly, when he came to picking shells in a foot or two of water, he would require to see what he was about, and would use his teeth. Natural selection would now come into play, and as those animals which had the best and longest teeth would succeed best, so they would have the best chance of transmitting these peculiarities to their descendants. The tusks of the walrus are not, as I mentioned before, a pair of extra teeth, but merely an enlargement or extraordinary development of the eye-teeth, and I think it is easy to conceive that any large carnivorous animal, driven by necessity to subsist on shell-fish under water, would, in a few thousands of generations, acquire such tusks.

Also he would soon learn to dive, and to hold his breath under water, and from generation to generation he would be able to stay longer below. As he would have very little use for his legs, they would soon become abortive as legs, and grow more into the resemblance of fins; the hind legs would somewhat resemble the tail of a fish, and would do duty for that organ; so his real tail would almost disappear, as is the case with the seal and the walrus.

The legs of the walrus, although almost abortive, are still legs, and not fins, as he can walk on all four on land or ice."

This will do. Comment would be a waste of words

The volume is in the Harpers' best style of execution, and is well worthy a place in the large and valuable collection of travels published by them.

* I stated, ante, that we had seen the white bear dive for a short distance, just

like a walrus.

ADVENTURES IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC.*-It is a long stride from the Polar seas to the South Pacific, though the difference between the sport of whale-fishing in the one, and of walrus-hunting in the other, is rather one of degree than of kind. But the description of the short, quick work of an eight weeks hunt for walruses and seals, amid the icebergs and under the unsetting sun of a Polar summer, is a totally different thing from the long drawn story of a four years search for whales amid the boundless waters of the Pacific.

This volume of adventures "lays no claim to literary merit." Two young men spent five years in whale-fishing, and "have compiled from their log-books and their recollection, a plain, unvarnished narrative of this period." There are minute descriptions of a whale-boat's equipments, of the chase, capture, and "cutting in" of numerous individual whales, together with dashes of life on ship-board, and numberless accounts of ports and islands visited and peoples met with between the coast of Peru and the shores of China and Japan. It will doubtless prove an entertaining and profitable book to readers not too critical or fastidious in their tastes, and not too well read on the topics and places of which it treats. Its claims to anything beyond this sphere can hardly be vindicated.

The evidences of candor and honesty which everywhere appear to pervade the volume, entitle the following paragraphs to notice. The writer is speaking of Rarotonga (Roratonga according to his orthography) the scene of the early labors and great success of Rev. John Williams, the pioneer missionary to the Society Islands, and the resting place of all that was rescued of his remains from his cannibal murderers at Erromanga.

"The English have a missionary station here, established several years since. Some of the natives like the present missionary, and some do not. The chiefs or rulers uphold him, but the 'people' say he is 'no good,' he makes them work too much. One of them informed us and we afterward found it to be true-that if a Kanaka failed to attend church on Sabbath, he had to pay the missionary one dollar either money or fruit; if he smoked on the Sabbath, the same penalty; and several other tyrannies are practised, which has the effect of causing the natives to hate the missionary and the Gospel he teaches, and shows that unprincipled and as well as good men are sent out, though not known to be such by those who send them, to spread the Gospel

* Life and Adventure in the South Pacific. By a Roving Printer. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1861.

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