48 REVIEWS — THE GREAT DESERTS OF NORTH AMERICA. 



scope for embellishment by a traveller of adequate powers. Still more, 

 the reading public, then, and for a couple of centuries after, was 

 gifted with an amplitude of faith in the compass of the marvellous 

 pertaining to strange lands, which only exposed a traveller to the cen- 

 sures of the incredulous, if he should venture to affirm that he had 

 seen anything among the Antipodes resembling matters at home. In 

 those days a Du Chaillu with his Gorillas and nest-building Troglo- 

 dites, would have been considered rather tame and common place ; 

 and the bookmaker who has spiced up Anderssen's "Okavango River'* 

 to the requisite seasoning for Mudie's readers, might have drawn on 

 his fancy as freely as the old romancers, who anticipated in their 

 creations the recovered Saurians of the Geological age of monsters. 

 It is curious, indeed, to note how, with each fresh accession to the 

 area of exploration, the appetite for the marvellous grows with what 

 it feeds on. The discovery of America gave wondrous scope to this ; 

 the explorations of the Southern Ocean in the eighteenth century 

 again revived it ; Layard in Asia, and Livingstone in iVfrica, have 

 furnished fresh incentives ; and guided by Franklin, Kane, and other 

 recent Arctic voyagers, the northern "regions of thick-ribbed ice '* 

 have warmed imaginations into a glow fit to melt the dread barriers 

 of their long-hidden mysteries ; until, amid the rivalry of arctic and 

 equatorial exploration, men's minds are divided on the question, 

 ■whether to look for the new terrestial paradise in undiscovered 

 islands of the "open Polar Sea," or in the unexplored platteau of 

 the African tropics. 



In the work named at the head of this article we have a recent 

 production of the European press^ which, though professing to be 

 rich in marvellous disclosures about the unknown regions of our own 

 Western hemisphere, has, we suspect, nearly escaped the attention of 

 Canadian readers. We are somewhat doubtful, indeed, whether many 

 of them have a very clear idea as to where our unexplored Am.erican 

 Zaharas lie. Such a mystery hangs about them, that seven years' resi- 

 dence in the Great Deserts of this New World ought to be productive 

 of some marvellous revelations; and here we have two portly and 

 elaborately illustrated volumes professedly teeming with such. 



When our great dramatist undertook to picture the courtship of 

 the Moor, and the tender, yielding sympathies of Desdemona, it 

 was with no thought of discrediting the veracity of his hero that the 

 poet represented him as calling his wonderful relations a traveller s 

 history : — 



