REVIEWS — THE GREAT DESERTS OF NORTH AMERICA. 61 



may also be recognised in plate 95 of Catlin's " North American In- 

 dians." Schoolcraft's well-known '* History of the Indian Tribes,'' 

 furnishes sundry plates of Indian weapons, implements, hieroglyphs, 

 &c. The American Ethnological Society's transactions have been 

 laid under contribution with equal freedom : and we shall only add 

 that if a single one of ^11 the numerous illustrations is original, — 

 which we more than doubt, — unless it has been drawn in a very 

 different fashion from the slovenly, untruthful copies we have com- 

 pared with their unacknowledged originals, it must be equally 

 worthless. 



The literary part of the book is managed with a little more skill 

 than the clumsy scissors-and-paste work of its pictorial decorations ; 

 and if the author really wrote his original in French, the double 

 process of translation borrowed materials must have undergone, would 

 confer on them a novel strangeness which the pencil of M. Joliet has 

 failed to give to the ethnographical illustrations. The facts and argu- 

 ments, in much the same sequence, may frequently be recognised in 

 the volumes from whence artistic tribute has been so freely levied, but 

 all specialities are for the most part so carefully avoided, that their 

 writers might be puzzled to prove ownership of the borrowed plumes ; 

 or establish a parentage for the changeling. Our author, moreover, 

 adroitly leaves the reader to assume that he is writing of what he 

 actually saw in '' The Great Desert ;" and yet when we attempt strictly 

 to analyse the words, it is apparent that he is not without a loop- 

 hole by which to escape from the charge of misrepresentation, if 

 it should leak out that all the journeyings of this highly accr3dited 

 Abbe have been limited to the well-trodden trail between Grub 

 Street and the Row ; with perchance an occasional exploration in the 

 fertile regions of Great Russell Street. Here, for example, is one of 

 his stories, — more precise and definite than most, — illustrative of the 

 cold-blooded atrocity of Indian revenge : — 



" A Mandan chief, Mahtotopa, whose portrait may be seen at the Museum of 

 Natural History in Paris, found one day near the village the body of his brother 

 pierced by a lance, which the murderer had left in the wound. He swore to 

 revenge his kinsman, took the lance covered with blood, and carried it to the vil- 

 lage, where it was recognised as belonging to Ononyatop, one of the bravest of 

 the Riccaree warriors. The Mandan chief took the Riccaree weapon in his hands, 

 and brandished it over his head before each cabin of the village, declaring in a 

 loud voice that he would kill Ononyatop with the very same weapon. He 

 waited in vain during four years for the opportunity of accomplishing hia 



