336 Bihliof/raphical Notices. 



increase. All these animals are said by Capt. Harris to be easily 

 overtaken by a good and well-conditioned horse, their very speed 

 being their destruction, frantic terror at such novel enemies causing 

 them to spend their strength in the exertions of a few miles. The 

 speed of the Camelopard is extraordinary, but ** our best horses 

 were able to close with him in about two miles." 



The great fault of Capt. Harris's book is a constant attempt to 

 assume a scientific character, which every page contradicts. There 

 is no precise information on the subject either of zoology or geogra- 

 phy, the two branches which the author particularly boasts of his 

 desire to investigate ; he does not appear to have made a single ob- 

 servation to ascertain either the latitude, longitude, or elevation of 

 the places he visited, nor to have carried any instruments for that 

 purpose ; and this is the more to be regretted, as he visited a part of 

 the country very seldom penetrated by Europeans. The positions 

 on his map are consequently laid down at least 20° wrong in lati- 

 tude, and their longitude of course must have been taken at random. 

 Though not a practised zoologist, Capt. Harris's hints on habits and 

 localities are often valuable, and they are given but as incidental 

 to the great thread of his discourse, which is a lively narrative of a 

 shooting excursion and nothing more ; but this very character de- 

 prives them of suspicion. To the end of the volume is added a de- 

 scriptive Catalogue of the Mammalia of Southern Africa, but which 

 contains little that was not previously known : it is in fact chiefly 

 copied (though without acknowledgement) from Dr. Andrew Smith's 

 •' African Zoology," a small work printed at Cape Town about eight 

 or ten years since, and we believe never published, though freely cir- 

 culated among the friends of the amiable and talented author. 



We have thus attempted to give a fair and impartial account of 

 Capt. Harris's volume. It is written in the lively dashing spirit of 

 a soldier and a sportsman : no one can read it without amusement, 

 and few without some instruction ; and if truth has obliged us to 

 mingle some slight censure with our general praise of the perform- 

 ance, it is because the pretensions which the author makes to sci- 

 entific knowledge create expectations which are disai)pointed in the 

 perusal. 



Deutschlands Lebermoose in getrockncten Exemplaren. Herausgege- 

 ben von Dr. J. W. P. Hiibener und C. F. E. Genth. 8vo. Mainz. 

 Florian Kupferberg, 1836 — 1839. Nos. 1 to 5. 

 To such of our readers as are students or collectors of Crypto- 



gamic plants, and we hope and believe that this class of botanists has 



