the emperor, nevertheless caught an animal between my legs, which much pleased the emperor. Nor is it unfrequent that the wildest animals are thus easily captured, when the circle has once closed in upon them."

"Spits were produced, and large fires lighted, to which some held their portions of meat; others flung the pieces into the fire for a moment, and then swallowed them, still dripping with blood, with great relish."

"In the thickets are white and red onions, which I conjecture to have been brought from Egypt (!). Persian roses are as abundant as thistles or brambles with us.'

"On these mountains, which have never before our expedition been ascended by man, trees are sometimes observed which have been injured by fire-a spectacle which greatly puzzled me when I first beheld it. I remarked that this conflagration always begins at the

stems."

Father Pereira most ingeniously suggests that this curious phenomenon was caused by the stag,—

"An animal which sheds its horns annually, and at this season is so plagued by the continual itching, that he rubs his horns to and fro with great violence against any substance till he gets rid of the itching and the horns together."

This explanation, he tells us, satisfied the Chinese, who called on him for an account of all out-of-the-way phenomena; and by way of satisfying the Europeans also that there may be something in his suggestions, he adds, "rotten wood gives out a light of itself by night, so that the smallest writing may be read by it."

"By these and like questions I was kept in continual occupation, and by my answers obtained great applause and consideration.

One of the great men of the court said to me, 'If we Tartars were to choose another religion than our own, I should embrace yours, because I never put any thing before its teachers but that I receive satisfaction in reply.'"

"It was so cold here that ten thousand horses died on the night of our arrival, the which were not even missed."

"In the middle" (of a high mountain, Pe Cha) "is a lake, said to be unfathomable, but which may rather be said to resist the attempt to fathom it, being always frozen."

In one of the great flocks of sheep that supplied the expedition "were captured two wolves, which kept company with the old sheep and fed on the young."

We cannot conclude our notice of these three remarkable epistles without expressing our regret that the published letters of the Jesuit missionaries of this period, or at least a selection from them, are not placed before the English public in an acces

sible form. Such a selection, well made and well translated, would be a most popular work.

The last work published by the Hakluyt Society is a Collection of Documents on Spitzbergen and Greenland. This volume contains three pieces. The first is a graphic description of Spitzbergen, written by F. Martens of Hamburg, who visited that locality in 1671. The translation before us was made from the German in 1674, and, together with the accompanying tracts, it is now edited by Mr. Adam White of the British Museum. (By the way, let us express our satisfaction that the staff of that institution is able to produce so many really "able editors.") Here, then, we have one genial naturalist edited by another equally genial and more scientific. This first and principal work is divided into sections treating severally of the voyage there and back, and of all the characteristic natural phenomena of Spitzbergen. The short chapters, each headed with the name of some plant, bird, fish, &c., do not promise much; but, after Jessie's famous gleanings, we know of no more amusing little work of the kind than this. F. Martens describes all he sees with sufficient accuracy and minuteness to be of service to the technical naturalist, and yet manages to delight the unscientific reader with the "touches of nature" to be found among the ice and crags of Spitzbergen. Here are a few of our traveller's remarks, taken from scores of others as good:

"There is hardly any difference of cold between night and day; yet at night, when the sun shineth, it seemeth to one that rightly considereth it, as if it was only clear moonlight, so that you may look upon the sun as well as you can upon the moon.'

Concerning the crags of Spitzbergen, he observes:

"Some are but one stone from the bottom to the top, appearing like an old decayed wall; they smell very sweet, as the green fields do in our country when it rains."

"On the 6th we had the same weather, and warm sunshine all night. Hard by us rode a Hollander; and the ship's crew, busie in cutting the fat off a whale, when the fish burst with so great a bounce as if a cannon had been discharged, and bespattered the workmen all over."

"All the herbs and mosses grow upon the grit and sand of the stones where the water falleth down, and on that side of the hill which the east and north winds cannot easily get at."

"If it be never so dark by reason of a mist, yet every bird knoweth how to find their own nest again, and flyeth directly to it."*

*Goethe makes a similar observation about the lark, in his Conversations with Eckermann.

Concerning certain birds called mallemucks, he writes:

They eat so much of the fat of the whales till they spew it up again, and tumble themselves over and over in the water until they vomit up the train-oil; and then they begin to eate afresh, until they grow aweary of eating. They bite one another and fight together, which is very good sport, about a piece of fat, fiercely, although there is enough for them all and to spare."

Really these mallemucks bear a more insulting resemblance to humanity than monkeys themselves!

There are many curious and entertaining facts about whales and sea-horses, and other monsters of the polar deep; but we must leave room for the Relation du Groenland, by Isaac de la Peyrère, the celebrated preadamite, who writes this account to his friend, Mons. La Mothe le Vayer, in 1644, with the object, apparently, of disproving a certain theory of the descent of the Americans from the Greenlanders, and of the Greenlanders from the Norwegians.

This Relation is a rambling and ill-written compilation from semi-fabulous Icelandic and Danish chronicles, mixed up, however, with some good pieces of description of the country, superstitions of mariners, &c. Among the facts gravely recorded we find the following Dantesque account of "three sea monsters of enormous size" sometimes seen in the " sea of Greenland :"

"The fish, which the Norwegians saw from the waist upwards out of the water, they called haffstramb: it was like a man about the neck, head, face, nose, and mouth, with the exception of the head being very much elevated and pointed towards the top. Its shoulders were broad, and at their extremity were to stumps of arms without hands. The body was slender below; but they have never been able to see its form lower than the waist. Its look was chilling. There were heavy storms each time that this phantom appeared on the water. The second monster has been called marguguer: it was formed down to the waist like a woman. It had large breasts, dishevelled hair, and huge hands at the ends of the stumps of the arms, with long fingers webbed like the feet of a duck. It was seen holding fish in its hand and eating them. This phantom always preceded some terrible storm. If it plunges into the water with its face towards the sailors, it is a sign that they will not be shipwrecked; but if it turns its back to them, they are lost."

Our author tells us, upon what authority we know not, that "the sea of Spitzbergen" produces whales two hundred feet long; and that, when their bodies are opened, "they find nothing but ten or twelve handsful of little black spiders, which are engendered by the bad air of the sea; and also a little green grass." The sea, he says, is sometimes darkened with these spiders, "and it is an infallible sign that the fishing will be good, for the whales follow the water that engenders this pestilence."

The natural history contained in this tract seems to be as apocryphal, for the most part, as the rest of the matter, which is, upon the whole, about the least valuable and interesting of any hitherto redeemed from obscurity by the Hakluyt Society. But, to make up for this falling short, the third and last piece in the volume is one of the most lively interest. This account of "God's power and providence, showed in the miraculous preservation of eight Englishmen left by mischance in Greenland, anno 1630, nine moneths and twelve dayes," is a reprint of an extremely scarce tract. It has been before reprinted in Churchill's collection, but an analysis of it will be new to most of our readers.

The writer of this tract, Edward Pelham, himself one of the eight who passed the most marvellous polar wintering on record, prefaces his narrative by challenging all former tales of endurance and peril in the same kind to compare with his. He makes particular reference to the wintering of Barentz and his men, of which we have already given our readers a sketch, and justly maintains, that the hardships of the Dutchmen's winter were not comparable to those of the eight English. These eight, "being employed in the service of the right worshipfull company of Muscovie merchants" on a whaling expedition, were despatched from their ship to hunt and kill "venison" for the ship's provision. All that they took with them was "a brace of dogs, a snap-hance, two lances, and a tinder-box," with victuals for a few days while hunting. The second day their ship "was forced so farre to stand off into the sea to be cleare of the yce" that they lost sight of her, and they thought it best to hunt along shore, in the direction of Green-harbour, the rendezvous of the whaling fleet. On arriving there, after seventeen days, the ships were gone, nor were they to be found on any part of the neighbouring coasts. Here, then, these men had to winter, with a brace of dogs, a tinder-box, and a firelock for all their provision; the coast and climate being such that, a short time previously, some malefactors who had been offered life on condition of making the experiment of passing one winter at this whaling station, on being taken to the spot, "conceived such a horror and inward feare in their hearts, as that they resolved rather to returne to England to make satisfaction with their lives than there to remaine." Nine men, who had been left by a similar accident and by the same captain (!), were found dead on the following year, 'cruelly disfigured by the savage beares and hungry foxes." After a short fit of prostration, they "began to conceive hope even out of the depth of despaire. Shaking off therefore all childish and effeminate feares, it pleased God to give us hearts like men." In order to make the best use of the

;

very few days of open weather remaining, they travelled back in their shallop to the hunting-grounds near Green-harbour, and succeeded, before the frost put a stop to hunting operations, in killing venison enough to go a good way towards a winter provision. Returning with their store to the whaling station at Bell Sound, with the intention of returning for more, if the weather permitted, they "were overtaken with night. The next day was Sunday: wherefore" (although their very existence seemed to depend on a day's work more or less,) "wee thought it fit to sanctifie the rest of it; taking the best course wee could for the serving of God Almighty, although wee had not so much as a booke." The next day they made small way on account of bad weather. They had to pass a second night on the shore and, on waking in the morning, saw that both their boats had been overturned, and were "swimming up and downe the shoare" empty of their lading of venison and whale-offal (found at Greenharbour), upon which their only hope of existence depended. Fortunately they managed to recover from the "high-wrought sea" not only their shallops, but much of their provision, a good deal of it much the worse for the brine. With this they at last reached Bell Sound, and proceeded to settle themselves for the winter, which was already upon them. Within a large "tent" or building used by the coopers during the whaling season, these hearty fellows built themselves a smaller apartment, with a Robinson-Crusoe-like thoroughness of comprehension of what they required, and excellent economy of their miserable means, which chiefly consisted of another ruined shed from which they obtained some boards, the bricks of the chimneys of some "boiling furnaces," an old bed, and the skins of the slain venison. With these they constructed quite a cosy and wind-proof apartment within the coopers' house. Their "next care was for firing to dresse their meate withall, and for keeping away the cold." Some "casks and crazie shallops," abandoned by former expeditions of the whaling company, afforded a considerable store; and their provisions were further increased by three "sea-horses" which were opportunely slain. When all had been done, and the winter was upon them, "finding our proportion too small by halfe for our time and companie, we agreed among ourselves to come to an allowance, and to keepe Wednesdayes and Fridayes fasting-dayes, excepting from the frittars or graves of the whale, a very loathsome meate." Some oil, found in the coopers' "tent," fed a lamp which they constructed out of a piece of sheet-lead and rope-yarn, during the long polar night; and thus, "humbling ourselves under the mighty hand of God, and casting ourselves down before him in prayer two or three times a-day, which course we constantly held all the time of our