REVIEWS THE GREAT DESERTS OP NORTH AMERICA. 49 



" "Wherein of aiitres vast and deserts idle, 



Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven, 



It was his hint to speak ; such was his process ; 



And of the Cannibals that each other eat, 



The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads 



Do grow beneath their shoulders !" 



To hear such very credible things the daughter of the old Venetian 

 senator did seriously incline ; and even in the Poet's own day, the 

 world of Columbus, Vespuccio, Cortes, and Pizarro, was so new, 

 strange, and little known, that it only required equally respectable 

 witnesses to prove that the Utopian Commonwealth of Hythloday 

 still flourished there, and that the aborigines' heads did grow beneath 

 their shoulders, instead of between them. For ourselves we live in a 

 time when it behooves us to make the most of our " travellers' tales." 

 Exploration progresses at such a rate that every year lessens that 

 unknown area, within which the Darwinian philosopher may still 

 speculate on the discovery of the transitional anthropoid animal in 

 his last stage of passage from apehood to manhood. But with a 

 Mudie's readers, multiplying by the thousands, the question of literary 

 supply and demand becomes scarcely less pressing than that of the cot- 

 ton supply to England's Manchester Associations ; and if we could only 

 furnish writers with the invention of a Defoe or the genius of a Swift, 

 we should be well content to trace out on our maps the voyages of 

 new Robinson Crusoes and Gullivers ; and like our fathers, give the 

 preference to the adventures of a Munchausen, rather than to the 

 Abyssinian travels of a Bruce. 



Amid such voluminous literature as the seven Essayists have recently 

 given birth to, the charge has been revived against this age of ours 

 that it is a sceptical one; but we demur to any such charge. Now and 

 then a literary adventurer like Du Chaillu, in his haste to meet the 

 sensational demands of the popular press, is hurried beyond reason, 

 and only discovers when too late, that he has crammed in an extra 

 year's travelling into the too precise interval between his A.D. 1856 

 and 1859. But within all reasonable compass the reading world is 

 still most charitably credulous with its " travellers' histories ;" and as 

 to their pictorial adjuncts, so that they please the eye, the standing 

 rule is, "no questions asked." When Messrs. Childs and Peterson, 

 the enterprising New York publishers, issued their beautifully illustrated 

 edition of Dr. Kane's " Arctic Expedition," no critic ventured to 

 inquire if the lamented traveller's sketch-book did actually contain the 

 germs of all its wonderful vignettes of Arctic scenery, sketched in the 



Vol. VII. D 



