Bibliographical Notices. 455 



both the authors and the publisher have used every effort to render 

 their ' History of British Sessile-eyed Crustacea ' as perfect as pos- 

 sible. It is a work to which we most heartily wish success, and 

 which we can warmly recommend to the notice of our readers. 



The Tropical World : a Popular Scientific Account of the Natural 

 History of the Animal and Vegetable Kingdoms in the Equatorial 

 Regions. By Dr. G. Hartwig. With eight Chromoxylographic 

 Plates and numerous Woodcuts. 8vo. London, Longmans, 1863. 



One of our ancient Universities is adorned by the presence of an 

 academic dignitary, of whom it has been somewhat irreverently said 

 that, while science is his forte, omniscience is his foible. It seems 

 to us that Dr. Hartwig' s talents entitle him to a remark exactly the 

 converse. Notwithstanding the expectation held out to us by his 

 title-page, we have been entirely at a loss to discover the " scientific " 

 element in his work. It is completely swamped by the " popular " 

 treatment. Moreover we do not see the advantage of culling, from 

 authors who have, in the best sense of the word, achieved " popu- 

 larity," passages which are as generally known to Englishmen as 

 the way from Hyde-Park Corner to the Mansion House. Nor, in 

 stringing together these extracts, does the compiler anywhere exhibit 

 the skill or art of the magician who, with one wave of his wand, re- 

 animates dry bones and calls up ideas that might otherwise remain 

 dormant even in the minds of the imaginative. Sir Emerson Ten- 

 nant has had bis thousands of readers, and Dr. Livingstone his tens 

 of thousands. What, then, but the very demon of book-making has 

 prompted the Heidelberg doctor to publish this exceedingly useless 

 work? We indeed admire his knowledge of our difficult idiom, 

 which he writes with scarcely a mistake, and generally with a purity 

 to which many of our countrymen are strangers ; but (and we say it 

 advisedly) his language never rises with his theme above the very 

 commonest of common-place expression. One chapter of the descrip- 

 tive portion of 'Tom Cringle's Log' will give a person who has 

 never left the temperate zone a better notion of many physical aspects 

 of the tropical world than a perusal of the whole of this big octavo. 

 Thus we fully endorse the strictures that were passed upon Dr. 

 Hartwig's former volume in these pages*. The two books are, 

 mutatis mutandis, as like one another as two peas. We have the 

 same abundant poverty of illustrations — woodcuts not better than 

 those which deface many a penny broad sheet, and, worse than these, 

 the marvellous tricoloured engravings dignified by the euphonious 

 designation of "chromoxylographic plates," It is well, however, to 

 be thankful for small mercies : ' The Sea and its Living Wonders ' 

 was embellished by a dozen of these monstrous productions ; in the 

 ' Tropical World ' the number is diminished by one-third. We have 

 been puzzling ourselves to no purpose by trying to account for the 

 insertion, among so much rubbish, of the figure of the Mongoose 



* Ann. & Mag. Nat. Hist., January 1861, pp. 63-67. 



