1864. | Geography. 463 
on that continent. We have no longer any of those elaborate and 
costly works, issued by the War Department of the United States, 
which once were a credit to the government that encouraged their 
production. For fifteen years the American Government published 
from time to time records of exploratory work done for them, the 
greatest and best probably being those of the expedition up the 
Colorado river of the West. All that we now get from North 
America is from surveyors in British Columbia and Vancouver's 
Island. One distinguished citizen of the Republic, Mr. George P. 
Marsh, who is well known in this country for his works on the English 
language and literature, and who is an accurate and extensive scholar 
of Norse literature, has written a volume, entitled ‘Man and Nature, 
or Physical Geography modified by Human Action.”* The object 
of this work is to estimate in some degree the character and extent of 
changes produced on the physical globe by human action, and to 
suggest the possibility and importance of the restoration of disturbed 
harmonies and the improvement of waste and exhausted regions. The 
book is written in a popular style. 
It isan extraordinary circumstance that the two continents, in some 
respects so remarkably similar, Africa and Australia, furnish us now 
with most of the topics on which geographers discourse. The 
practical problem of how to produce the greatest amount of wool of 
a fine texture, and of late a similar search for land on which to grow 
cotton, combined with an outlet for our surplus population, has led to 
several attempts to penetrate into various parts of the interior of 
Australia, not leading to any very astonishing discoveries, but at the 
same time gradually adding to our knowledge of the geographical, and, 
as a necessary consequence, the geological peculiarities of this con- 
tinent. The interior of Africa affords more reasons and encourage- 
ments to the discoverer. The very profitable traffic in its peculiar 
productions is attractive to one class of minds, but many more are 
led on by a sort of romance, a desire to penetrate into the unknown, 
to live a wild life, holding in subjection nature and nature’s children, 
to discover some of nature’s secrets ; whilst others again, and these, 
perhaps, not the least heroic, are tempted to try and disseminate the 
seeds of Christianity and civilization amongst the wild tribes, whom 
one at least of the savants of the present day believes to be incapable 
of higher cerebral development without incurring the risk of falling 
forward and becoming a rational quadruped ! Thus these two con- 
tinents, each with its ‘extraordinary fauna and flora, running back into 
ancient geological periods, each of a somewhat similar geological 
formation, consisting of an external ring of mountains, and enclosing 
great central plains, with rivers running inwards, and either drying 
up or terminating in central lakes, are the points +o which our atten- 
tion is now directed. 
The colony of Queensland, at the present time, owing to the war 
* «Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action.’ 
By George P. Marsh, author of ‘Lectures on the English Language,’ “The 
Student’s Manual of the English Language, &e. 8vo, Sampson Low, Son,.and 
Marston. 
