the pale of such well accredited veracity as is certified here. We seem to look in fancy on the good young Abbé, who, enchanted doubtless with the reception his first volumes met with, has been induced, as he tells us in his preface, "to continue the publication of his ethnographical studies, and the precious notes gleaned during his sojourn in the New World, on the nature, the aspect, and the singularity of the American Deserts, as likewise with regard to those savage tribes who are as varied in their physical appearance as they are similar in their civil and religious organization." Were not the many-titled Bishop of Montpellier's authentication of his titular canon's identity abundantly sufficient for the purpose, the Messrs. Longman would no doubt be prepared with their testimonials. So far, however, as the materials wrought up into two portly volumes, out of the Abbé's "precious notes," are concerned, we must confess we should not find it very difficult to believe that their author never travelled beyond the purlieus of Grub Street. The preface led us to expect a tale fit to captivate another Desdemona. "America," says the Abbé, "is comparatively speaking, a new country, a virgin land, which contains numerous secrets." Again he exclaims: "In those wildernesses there are actually to be found hieroglyphical monuments, immense ruins; white, red, and brown Indians; albinos, bearded men, and men without beards ;" and then he adds: "This work is but a detailed programme of what I hope to publish gradually on this subject. I have spared neither fatigue nor labour to give my readers an exact idea of the great wildernesses of America, and of the Indian tribes they contain. If I have not been able to derive much help from the books published by some writers who have treated on this subject, it is because their accounts are, generally speaking, exclusively confined to the Indians of the United States." Nevertheless, he confesses to having read Schoolcraft and Catlin's works, the publications of the Smithsonian and Ethnographical Societies, and the reports of the United States Scientific Expeditions, "either," as he says, "to generalise my opinions or to complete my narrative."

After such a flourish of trumpets, from an author so rich in the abundance and novelty of his materials, that these two portly volumes constitute the mere programme of what he hopes to publish on the subject: we were surely justified in anticipating the opening up of virgin soil. Instead of this, however, the perusal of these "programme" volumes rewards us only with a stale rifacimento of crude,

or exploded ethnological platitudes, and a vague expatiation over all hitherto explored corners of the map of North America, but without a noticeable addition to our knowledge of "parts unknown." Far be it from us to doubt that there actually does exist-in London, Montpellier, Rome, or Texas,-this "good and brave Abbé Domenech;" but it certainly lay within the capacity of an ordinary Grub Street book-hack, to compile quite as good an omnium gatherum of extracts from American blue-books, and Scientific Society's publications, without ever travelling beyond his ink-bottle and library shelves. The much-abused Du Chaillu, not only was in Africa, but brings home and sells to Professor Owen, his gorillas, in proof that he did shoot them; in spite of sceptical naturalists who trace his illustrations to Parisian photographs and other handy material. But the explorer of our American Deserts does not, so far as we can discover, furnish a solitary picture of the novel ethnographic or other secrets revealed to his favoured eye in the " "Virgin Land " of his exploration.

The volumes are set forth as "illustrated with fifty wood-cuts, by A. Joliet, three plates of ancient Indian music, and a large map shewing the actual situation of the Indian tribes and country described by the author." As for the last of these, it is comprehensive enough to satisfy any definition of the so-called " great deserts of North America," for it is a map of the whole continent from the Hudson's Bay to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific Coasts; and well answering in its vagueness to the book itself, which proves to be a weary journey through "Great Deserts" of printed wastes, instead of through actual savage-haunted wildernesses. So far, however, is the map from representing "the actual situation of the Indian tribes," now, or during the supposed travels of the author, that we find the Hurons, for example, on the Georgian Bay, from whence they were driven or extirpated while Canada was still a French Colony; and the Shawnees and other tribes, on Lake Erie, where our Abbé, had he really gone to visit them, would have found only the busy population of their long-settled white supplanters. In truth, though our author does here and there seem for a moment to refer to things seen by himself, it is in so vague and dubious a fashion, and interspersed among so many more he certainly never did see, that but for his previous "missionary adventures in Mexico and Texas," we should have been strongly tempted to enquire after “the

good Abbé" among those unpretending men-of-all-work, who cater for the book-manufacturers of Paternoster Row, and pen their veracious chronicles

"Of most disastrous chances,

Of moving accidents by flood and field;
Of hair-breadth 'scapes,"

and all without ever missing the familiar Cockney music of Bow-bells. We say, but for the author's previous adventures. But there are other credentials also, which surely lie beyond the inventive art of the Book-maker, in those fifty-eight showy Zylographs which give such an air of well-authenticated accuracy to the volumes. There are portraits of natives, pictures of strangest scenery, engravings of inscriptions, native implements, pottery, &c., bringing home to our firesides the wonders of the great deserts; or, failing in this, illustrating the latest economic development of free trade in the Grand Art of Book-making.

Our first glance at the Abbé's illustrations suggested a strange familiarity in their choice picturings, such as was scarcely to be expected in his revelations of the mysteries of a "virgin land ;" and the result of a little research to which this tempted us, may perhaps help the reader to some idea of the requisite process in the newly developed manufacture, whereby two goodly volumes of fascinating travel may be got up, with the help of a good name, and a reputable dedication, by any one who has access to a moderately furnished library. And first for the ethnology of the volumes. Volume II. figures for its frontispiece, a genuine "Comanche" in highly characteristic attitude, on horseback, and with his long lance in rest upon his left arm. But the original may be seen by any one curious on the subject, in a quarto plate, not of Comanches, but Navajos, drawn by H. B. Mölhausen, the artist of the U. S. Exploring party for a Railway route to the Pacific; Washington, 1855, p. 31. Like most of the other borrowed illustrations, the figure, which is one of a group, is reversed, and the features are so poorly copied as to be worthless for all ethnological purposes. The same Washington Report in like manner supplies the Mojave Indian, introduced at p. 40, vol. II., but still worse drawn, and if possible, more worthless for anything but a child's picture book. At an earlier date there issued from the Washington Bureau certain "Reports of the Secretary of War, with reconnaisances of routes from San Antonio to El Paso," and these, being little likely to come under the eye of ordinary readers, have

proved a mine of wealth for our adventurer;-who might aptly exclaim with the stay-at-home author of "The Task,"

"He travels, and expatiates; as the bee,

And spreads the honey of his deep research

At his return,-a rich repast for me;

He travels, and I too!"

In volume II., an account of the "Indians of the Pueblos " occurs, vague and uncircumstantial, as ever second-hand materials were; and with its more defined pictorial illustration to eke out the text. But here again the so called "Pueblo Indian proves to be a coarse caricature, the reverse of plate IV, of the Washington War Reports of 1850, representing in the original,-not a mere ordinary Indian, but "Hos-ta, or the lightning, governor of the Pueblo of Jémez." On the contrary the so called "Navajo Chief," of the Abbé, appears in pl. LII. of the same War Report, merely as an illustration of Navajo costume; but to fit him for his sudden promotion, a dandified shield with scalp-locks, borrowed from the fashions of the totally diverse tribes of the north, is substituted for the plain oval shield of hide, as originally drawn by R. H. Kern, the draughtsman of the Navajo Expedition. Ridiculous as such incongruous additions appear to any one familiar with the Indians of the north and of the south, they are trifles compared with the olla podrida served up, at p. 207, of vol. I., in the plate designated "Inscription Rock." This accompanies a description of the El Moro Rock of the Sierra Madre, one of the most extensive and curious groups of native and early European graven records hitherto discovered on the whole continent. Like most other descriptions from his pen, the reader is left to guess as he best may, whether the author pretends to have seen the objects he thus vaguely describes: "Beyond the Agua Fria you descend the western slope of the Sierra Madre, and reach a very open valley wherein may be seen the Rock of Inscriptions called El Moro by the Mexicans ;" and so the writer proceeds,—in a diluted version of Lieut. J. H. Simpson, of U. S. Topographical Corps' narrative of his visit to the El Moro in 1849,—to tell, with all the indefiniteness of a borrowed report, what you may, can, might, would, or could see, gentle reader, if you only were there. But as to the accompanying illustration, be certain, if it is ever your fortune to visit the Sierra Madre, you will search in vain for its prototype; though without travelling any such perilous journey, you may discover its materials in the unmentioned volume of Washington War Reports now referred to, from whence there can be

little doubt the Abbé has drawn all his knowledge of the Moro Inscriptions. To this conclusion we are led, not only by the fact that the illustrative plate is a patchwork of scraps gleaned from half-a-dozen lithographs appended to Lieut. Simpson's Report, with Spanish inscriptions and Indian hieroglyphics transposed, reversed, and jumbled up together into as pretty a specimen of rock-engraving as the most credulous could desire: but also from another little bit of circumstantial evidence. Chap. XXI. is devoted to the subject of Indian ideography, inscriptions, &c., and with a cool effrontery, which might put Barnum himself out of countenance, our traveller thus com, ments on the shortcomings of his predecessors: "Thus do those men, prudent travellers, learned from intuition, return home to regale their countrymen with the history of a people they have hardly per ceived, and describe places into which they have never ventured to enter; the consequence is that their narratives abound in errors and exaggerations. One cannot be too guarded against writers who invent respecting matters they know nothing about, and who translate while misunderstanding the works already published on the same subject." Having delivered himself with this lofty air, of his opinion of European travellers and their books in general, our author proceeds to illustrate by example his ideas of a more virtuous course, and resumes the subject of the Moro inscriptions, because as he says, they "have never been mentioned in any scientific or geographical work published in Europe." It is, of course, much too trivial a matter for him to condescend to notice, that they have not only been mentioned, but transcribed and illustrated in fac-simile, in Lieut. Simpson's Report. But though, as the latter tells us, they were described to him in what, after personal inspection, he acknowledges to have been no very extravagant hyperbole, as "half an acre of inscriptions," it is a singular coincidence that the Abbé not only does not chance to have noted a single example which his predecessor had not already copied ; but where the latter, in transcribing the longest of them, has inadvertently added on to its commencement, the name of "Bartolomé Narrso," which, as appears from the fac-simile, stands apart and entirely distinct from it, the Abbé, by the most unaccountable accident, has fallen into the very same error ! .

Other inscriptions are from more familiar sources, such as Schoolcraft's "Indian Tribes," the American Ethnological Society's Proceedings, &c., though it is not a little amusing to find the learned