REVIEWS. 
273 
Anahuac ; or, Mexico and the MexicanSy Ancient and Modem. 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 cares, 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, sittiog 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 fliut-lock, stands 
at the city gate, and when you step outside you feel yourself amongst the high 
shifting sandhills that stretch away for miles around 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 Avith 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 sliift- 
ing sandhills to lava-currents ; from silver -mines to limestone-quarries. It 
wtII 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 caimot fail to interest our readers. 
" Soon after nightfall we got back to the English um, 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- 
menUes'), 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 Real 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.] 
