3G0 REVIEWS — XOTES 0>~ CENTRAL AMERICA. 



quartos and elaborate folios of the seventeenth century, in which the 

 author, after having invesl .1 whole dungeons of learning in his ample 

 pages, seems resolved to write the work over ag ,in on his first leaf. 

 Caxton, and Chepman, and Wynkyn de Worde, got on very well 

 without the modern invention of a title page ; and the tendency in 

 our own day is — if not altogether to follow their example in dis- 

 pensing with it, — at least to make, of such " frontispieces," mere 

 titles, and not indexes, catalogues-raisonnes, and tables of contents. 

 The Author of "Notes on Central America," however, has sundry 

 and diverse purposes in view, which even his ample title only embraces 

 under the comprehensive " etc., etc." He has not only to set 

 Ethnologists and Geographers right in relation to the country 

 and its inhabitants, and to instruct the world at large as to the true 

 line for the inter-oceanic railway or canal which shall wed the Atlan- 

 tic and Pacific Oceans, but he has to nip in the bud "the pretensions 

 of the British Government," and put both hemispheres for the first 

 time in possession of the true bearings of this mysterious Central 

 American difficulty between England and the States, which — not- 

 withstanding Mr. Squier's goodly octavo, and many subsequent 

 elucidations, official and unofficial — is still a mystery : vague, windy, 

 and full of empty bluster, to not a few. A single extract from what 

 the author styles his geographical introduction, will sufficiently 

 shew his animus in this latter direction. After commenting on the 

 imperfect data and blundering inaccuracies of Map-makers, excusable 

 till recently by the unimportant nature of the country, he adds : 



"Now, however, the case is widely different: not only is the value of Central 

 America, in every point of view, beginning to be appreciated, but the enterprise of 

 our people is setting in that direction in a full an 1 increasing current. Apart from 

 these strictly geographical errors, there arj others in the various maps of Central 

 America which are without apology and excuse; I mean the servile perpetuation 

 in American maps of the arbitrary political subdivisions of the country, made un- 

 der English authority, to sustain the pretensions of the British Government. The 

 servility on the part of American map-makers shews how little pains they use to 

 verify the facts which they undertake to present, and how profoundly ignorant they 

 have continued to keep themselves of the issue of the scrutiny to which, in Cen- 

 tral America, British pretensions have been subjected. Several map3 have been 

 published within a year in the United States which are obnoxious to the severest 

 cer-sure on this score. 



" I have selected, as an illustration of the justice of these censures, and as afford- 

 ing an opportunity of correcting several surprising blunders, a sheet map, entitled 

 " Johnston's Illustrated and Embellished Map and Chart of the New World. 

 New York, 1844." And here I may observe that, although thismap, so far as Cen- 

 tral America is concerned, both geographically and politically, is full of the most 

 egregious errors, yet it is in no degree more open to criticism than nine-tenths 









