Bibliographical Notice*. 133 



sioned to perform bore reference to these two points of difficulty. 

 And she returned with her mission completed as regards the first, by 

 the survey of the " Inner Route : " as regards the second, by that of 

 so much of the Louisiade Archipelago, the South Coast of New 

 Guinea and of the Coral Sea, as will henceforth enable vessels to 

 travel there in safety. 



It is melancholy to reflect that the commander of the expedition, 

 Captain Owen Stanley, the eldest son of the late lamented Bishop of 

 Norwich, known to all as a sedulous cultivator of natural science, 

 lived only to perform the task which had been assigned to him, — not 

 to reap the honours and rewards which he had won, nor by his per- 

 sonal influence to secure to his fellow-labourers that recognition and 

 assistance from their common superiors which their work had fairly 

 earned, — an object which to him, we cannot doubt, would have been 

 as sacred as his own advancement. 



As the ' Rattlesnake ' was about to visit almost the last corner of 

 the world, accessible by sea, to which Europeans had not penetrated, 

 and therefore was likely to be in the midst of forms of animal and 

 vegetable life of a new and interesting kind, she was provided with a 

 naturalist in the person of Mr. MacGillivray, the able author of the 

 work before us. The expedition, in this respect, has been very for- 

 tunate ; for whether we regard the extensive and carefully preserved 

 collections which have been sent home by that gentleman — collections, 

 we are informed, on very high authority, equal in value to any that 

 have ever been made in any expedition — or the terse and manly 

 simplicity of the narrative of the Voyage, so different from the blatant 

 platitudes and " middy' s-grave" sentimentalities of some on which 

 we could lay our hands, and reminding us more of the close observa- 

 tion, concise expression and occasional quiet humour of old Dampier, 

 we cannot but think that the interests of natural science have been 

 well cared for. 



More incident interesting to the general reader occurs in this nar- 

 rative than falls to the lot of most travellers in these prosaic times, 

 when a eircumnavigatory voyage is by no means a thing to boast 

 about — rather a " slow" affair in fact than otherwise. 



We find Robinson Crusoeish accounts of people to whom iron was 

 valueless, who looked upon a white face as a clever though very dis- 

 agreeable piece of painting, and held guns to be vessels for the safe 

 conveyance of water ; stories of men who delighted in cultivating 

 heads of hair some two feet in diameter with combs of proportiouable 

 size, — until one almost wishes that the Rattlesnake's commander had 

 followed Torres' s quaint proceeding and " caught in all this land 

 twenty persons of different nations, that with them we might be able 

 to irive a better account to your majesty." — Vol. i. p. 170. 



Then it was the good fortune of the expedition to rescue from a 

 condition of misery, an Englishwoman who had been WTecked and had 

 ■pent some years among the Australian natives, a people whose no- 

 tions of the convenances of society, according to our author, would 

 not seem to make a prolonged stay among them either agreeable or 

 improving. Take for instance the following anecdote, We 



