REVIEWS. 



273 



Anahuac ; or, Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern. By Edw. B« 

 Tylor. London : Longman and Co , 1861. 



It is really a treat to read a book like Mr. Tylor's. Free, easy, lightly and 

 pleasantly written, and yet containing really solid information and material. 



In the spring of 1856 Mr. Tylor met another traveller, Mr. Christy, acci- 

 dentally, in an omnibus at Havanna. Mr. Christy had been wandering in Cuba 

 amongst the sugar-plantations, and copper-mines, and coffee-estates, descend- 

 ing into caves, and botanizing in tropical jungles ; Mr. Tylor had been for the 

 best part of the year in the United States, and had just left the live-oak forests 

 and sugar-plantations of Louisiana. So the two travellers agreed to visit 

 Mexico, and heartily glad will everybody be who reads the book which their 

 adventure has produced that they did so. 



It opens pleasantly with this incident, takes us on a delightful excursion to 

 the Isle of Pines, off the Southern coast of Cuba. Then the two travellers 

 proceed from Havana to Vera Cruz, and from Vera Cruz to Mexico. Our old 

 English authors of the seventeenth century used to make their books as short 

 as possible ; they never said in six words what they could say properly in five, 

 and they always tried to say what they had to say properly. They were pithy, 

 curt, quaint, often laconic. 



Mr. Tylor always says everything he has to say properly ; more than this, 

 he says it pleasantly, correctly, wittily, amusingly, concisely. Politics, religion, 

 the habits of people, the characters of individuals, political economy, statistics, 

 warfare, physical geography, geology, and scenery, are all treated with a mas- 

 terly hand. As he walks through Vera Cruz, he describes the white coral- 

 rock houses, mildewed and dismal-looking. You feel the melancholy plague- 

 stricken look of the place ; you see the great turkey-buzzards, with their bald 

 heads and foul dingy-black plumage, sitting in compact rows on parapets of 

 houses or churches, and thence leisurely swooping down on the offal in the 

 streets, one after the other. Palpably the sentry, with his old flint-lock, stands 

 at the city gate, and when you step outside you feel yourself amongst the high 

 shifting sandhills that stretch away for miles arouud Vera Cruz. And so it is 

 throughout the journey : you understand exactly what Mr. Tylor and Mr. 

 Christy are doing ; you know perfectly well who they met and what they saw ; 

 you know even exactly what time they got home to dinner, or who they dined 

 out with, and you do not feel the least angry with Mr. Tylor for telling you. 

 In fact, you do not know that he has told you ; you have been one of the party, 

 and of course you know what you did when you were with the travellers. Mr. 

 Tylor is a consummate word-painter of incidents and scenery — a witty, cheerful, 

 agreeable narrator. 



Matters geological there are plenty of in this charming volume, from shift- 

 ing sandhills to lava-currents ; from silver -mines to limestone-quarries. It 

 well suits us to give a long extract from Mr. Tylor's book. The obsidian 

 knives were not likely to be overlooked by two such well-read and observant 

 travellers. The subject at the present time cannot fail to interest our readers. 



" Soon after nightfall we got back to the English inn, and went to bed with- 

 out any further event happening, except the burning of some outhouses, which 

 we went out to see. The custom of roofing houses with pine-shingles ('tacu- 

 meniles'), and the general use of wood for building all the best houses, make 

 fires very common here. During the few days we spent in the Ileal district, I 

 find in my note-book mention of three fires which we saw. We spent the 

 next day in resting, and in visiting the mine-works near at hand. The day 



[SUPPLEMENT TO THE " GEOLOGIST," No 41.] 



