2 Lieutenant-Colonel Hamilton Smith 
descriptions without restriction or omission; the more im- 
portant to science, because none other will be published by 
the author in a separate form ; since the greater part of his 
valuable collections have unfortunately perished by fire, in 
their passage by steam down the rivers of the United States, 
and, consequently, could not again be referred to. 
We do not know how far, in the translations, the notion of 
adapting a foreign work, to what is called the national taste, 
has been extended, but in a general point of view, a scien- 
tific publication, necessarily intended for the learned and stu- 
dious, should be, we think, translated with great caution, 
even though it hath appeared in the form of a journal. In 
England and America, the native writers of travels have 
often indulged, each adverting to the land of his own birth, 
in national self-complacencies and national reflections, but 
little creditable to their tastes, and calculated to increase 
more than abate the evils they profess to denounce. The 
work before us contains no evidence of a similar tendency, 
and in this sense may want the salt of malevolence: it is of 
quite a different mould, though the illustrious traveller, fa- 
miliar with the courts of sovereigns, and well acquainted 
with the habits of many nations, might easily have indulged 
in that kind of remark which recommends itself so strongly 
to the curiosity of common readers ; but he never descends 
into comment on the habits of private life, or domestic fa- 
milies ; never holds up with triumphant complacency his own 
nationality, but, solelyand enthusiastically bent on the pursuit 
of Natural History, self is not made prominent in any form. 
There are no smart repartees, no claims to the character of 
being a first-rate shot, no unheard-of hardships endured, 
although, for several months, his whole party were obliged 
to live entirely in the Indian fashion; and there is scarce 
mention of any danger having been incurred. Seeking new 
facts in the wildernesses of the far west, as he had previously 
done in the tropical regions of Brazil, not so much with that 
thrist for notoriety, which besets so many public men, that 
his name might be celebrated in the halls of science, as to 
follow the impulses of a nature which continues to draw him 
mightily to the abstractions of research, as they formerly 
