66 REVIEWS THE GREAT DESERTS OF NORTH AMERICA. 



little doubt the Abbe lias drawu all his knowledge of the Moro Inscrip- 

 tions. To this conclusion we are led, not only by the fact that the 

 illustrative plate is a patchwork of scraps gleaned from half-a-dozen 

 lithographs appended to Lieut. Simpson's Report, with Spanish 

 inscriptions and Indian hieroglyphics transposed, reversed, and jum- 

 bled up together into as pretty ^a specimen of rock-engraving as the 

 most credulous could desire : but also from another little bit of cir- 

 cumstantial evidence. Chap. XXI. is devoted to the subject of Indian 

 ideography, inscriptions, &c., and with a cool eflFrontery, which might 

 put Barnum himself out of countenance, our traveller thus com- 

 ments on the shortcomings of his predecessors : " Thus do those 

 men, prudent travellers, learned from intuition, return home to regale 

 their countrymen with the history of a people they have hardly per- 

 ceived, and describe places into which they have never ventured to 

 enter ; the consequence is that their narratives abound in errors and 

 exaggerations. One cannot be too guarded against writers who invent 

 respecting matters they know nothing about, and who translate while 

 misunderstanding the works already published on the same subject." 

 Having delivered himself with this lofty air, of his opinion of 

 European travellers and their books in general, our author pro- 

 ceeds to illustrate by example his ideas of a more virtuous course, 

 and resumes the subject of the Moro inscriptions, because as he 

 says, they " have never been mentioned in any scientific or geogra- 

 phical work published in Europe." It is, of course, much too trivial 

 a matter for him to condescend to notice, that they have not only 

 been mentioned, but transcribed and illustrated in fac-simile, in Lieut. 

 Simpson's Report. But though, as the latter tells us, they were 

 described to him in> what, after personal inspection, he acknowledges 

 to have been no very extravagant hyperbole, as "half an acre of 

 inscriptions," it is a singular coincidence that the Abbe not only does 

 not chance to have noted a single example which his predecessor had 

 not already copied ; but where the latter, in transcribing the longest of 

 them, has inadvertently added on to its commencement, the name of 

 "Bartolome Narrso," which, as appears from the fac-simile, stands 

 apart and entirely distinct from it, the Abbe, by the most unaccount- 

 able accident, has fallen into the very same error ! 



Other inscriptions are from more familiar sources, such as School- 

 craft's " Indian Tribes," the American Ethnological Society's Pro- 

 ceedings, &c., though it is not a little amusing to find the learned 



