REVIEWS — THE GREAT DESERTS OF NORTH AMERICA. 53 



or exploded ethnological platitudes, and a vague expatiation over all 

 hitherto explored corners of the map of North America, but without 

 a noticeable addition to our knowledge of "parts unknown." Far 

 be it from us to doubt that there actually does exist — in London, 

 Montpellier, Rome, or Texas, — this "good and brave Abbo Domenech;" 

 but it certainly lay within the capacity of an ordinary Grub Street 

 book-hack, to compile quite as good an omnium gatherum of extracts 

 from American blue-books, and Scientific Society's publications, 

 without ever travelling beyond his ink-bottle and library shelves. 

 The much-abused Du Chaillu, not only was in Africa, but brings 

 home and sells to Professor Owen, his gorillas, in proof that he did 

 shoot them ; in spite of sceptical naturalists who trace his illustra- 

 tions to Parisian photographs and other handy material. But the 

 explorer of our x'Vmerican Deserts does not, so far as we can discover, 

 furnish a solitary picture of the novel ethnographic or other secrets 

 revealed to his favoured eye in the "Virgin Land" of his ex- 

 ploration. 



The volumes are set forth as " illustrated with fifty wood- cuts, by 

 A. Joliet, three plates of ancient Indian music, and a large map shew- 

 ing the actual situation of the Indian tribes and country described by 

 the author." As for the last of these, it is comprehensive enough 

 to satisfy any definition of the so-called " great deserts of North 

 America," for it is a map of the whole continent from the Hudson's 

 Bay to the Gulf of Mexico, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific 

 Coasts ; and well answering in its vagueness to the book itself, which 

 proves to be a weary journey througli " Great Deserts " of printed 

 wastes, instead of through actual savage-haunted wildernesses. So 

 far, however, is the map from representing " the actual situation of 

 the Indian tribes," now, or during the supposed travels of the author, 

 that we find the Hurons, for example, on the Georgian Bay, from 

 whence they were driven or extirpated while Canada was still a 

 French Colony ; and the Shawnees and other tribes, on_ Lake Erie, 

 where our Abbe, had he really gone to visit them, would have found 

 only the busy population of their long-settled white supplanters. In 

 truth, though our author does here and there seem for a moment to 

 refer to things seen by himself, it is in so vague and dubious a fashion, 

 and interspersed among so many more he certainly never did see, 

 that but for his previous " missionary adventures in Mexico and 

 .Texas," we should have been strongly tempted to enquire after " the 



