50 REVIEWS THE GREAT DESERTS OF NORTH AMERICA. 



dread polar midnight, when imagination has to picture the indefatig- 

 able draughtsman exposed to a temperature in which the mercury 

 freezes in his thermometer, and manipulating in the dark, with his pencil 

 in a hand gloved and furred, till it was less delicate than a polar bear's 

 paw. The genuineness of the touching narrative no one questioned ; 

 and illustrations being in request, the artists of Philadelphia and New 

 York proved equal to the demand, whatever may have been the rude 

 suggestive scraps of pencilling from which they wrought. But even 

 this failed to satisfy the omniverous appetite of a reading public. A 

 second American x\rctic narrative followed, and might have command- 

 ed as unquestioning a welcome as the first, had not the rogues 

 fallen out over the spoils ; and the Philadelphian correspondent of a 

 New York journal given publicity to the quarrel, as the exposure of 

 " a piece of literary swindling worthy of the notorious Barnum." 

 " It is well known," writes this correspondent, " that Dr. Kane's 

 \<rork on the Arctic Expedition was all the rage a short time ago in 

 American society. An engraver named Cyram has lately sued the 

 publishers, Lloyd & Co., of Philadelphia, for the sum of $264, due 

 for engraving plates for Dr. Kane's work. Some amusing facts came 

 out on the trial. It appears that the picture representing the Advance 

 stuck in the ice, was copied from an old picture in Captain Cook's 

 Voyages in the Southern Seas, with ice thrown in ad libitum. The 

 portrait purporting to be Sontag, one of Kane's officers, was altered 

 trom a portrait of a highwayman in the National Police Gazette. 

 An engraving representing the occulation of Saturn, was produced by 

 altering an eclipse of the sun from an old geography ; and there was 

 more of the same sort. If this is the way Philadelphia publishers 

 bring out the crack books of the season, they deserve to be as world- 

 famous as the Philadelphia lawyers." 



These, however, are the doings on this progressive side of the 

 Atlantic, where the ideas of publishing, copyright, and book-begetting 

 all together, have revealed a stage of development unknown to Europe's 

 fossil old stagers. Indeed England has hitherto flattered herself that 

 " Barnum "is quite a distinct and purely American variety of the 

 species ; and rather taken comfort from the thought that his grand 

 science of Humbug finds its fitting sphere only in the Great Eepublic ; 

 nor need she be startled out of her self-complacency by the whisper of 

 a Du Chaillu and his Gorillas. The traveller is none of her begetting, 

 but a sort of nondescript, Americanised, African Frenchman, recently 



