dressing skins, and making knives, and various other articles, such as axes, adzes, &c. But he will have it that this is done only for “ amusement in the public place; as if a London engraver were to carry a plate of copper to the Royal Exchange, to engrave upon, while conversing with his friends." This seems to us a rather strange representation of the chief motive to the manufacturing of articles, many of them of the first necessity, manufactured assuredly because they are so, while, no doubt, the workmen are glad to exhilarate the employment by the social gaiety and rattle. The place where useful work, on a large scale, is done mainly for amusement, is the locality on earth which will remain the very last to be discovered. Geography will be complete when it is found.

NATURE OF AFRICAN GLORY.

A worse feature than their idleness is their utter insensibility to suffering which they behold or inflict. There were several revolting instances, besides the high self-complacency with which a distinguished personage, acting as lieutenantgovernor of the city, spoke of a plundering expedition a great way to the eastward, in which he and his associates, having fallen in with a people who had no instruments of defence, had the more easily pillaged them, and murdered great numbers, which he regarded as a fortunate and laudable affair.

THE WANKETZENS AND THEIR MURDEROUS PROPENSITIES.

Mr. Campbell made, during his sojourn at Lattakoo, every proper effort to collect information concerning the inhabitants still further in the interior; and he has enumerated many nations or tribes, with brief notices respecting the strength, character, and habits, of several of them. The Wanketzens, whose city Melita is five or six days' journey from Lattakoo, make a very considerable figure, and have an additional prominence from the circumstance of being the murderers of Dr. Cowan and his attendants, who had been sent from the Cape on an expedition of discovery. Mr. Campbell received the most unquestionable evidence, and some of the details of this fact, which appeared to have produced a great

sensation through a wide extent of country. The party discovered, on the first day of their residence at Lattakoo, that the visit was very strongly suspected by the inhabitants of being upon some design of revenge, in which even they might be involved, insomuch that it was afterwards learned that numbers had quitted the city under this apprehension. Prompt measures were taken by Mr. Campbell to obviate this suspicion. The Wanketzens and their chief were represented and proved to be systematically treacherous and cruel, the plunder and destruction of foreigners, most especially of whites, being a perfectly established principle of their policy. The plundering and murdering expedition before alluded to as performed, and with such delight related, by one of the highest of the nobility of Lattakoo, was an active career of no less than ten months' duration.

AN AFRICAN DESERT.

A very large portion of the several hundreds of leagues which our party had yet to travel, lay through tracts of that most perfect kind of desert to which so large a part of Africa is doomed to the end of time, that is, moveable sand. It must truly be dreary almost to horror to labour day after day through this most dread and hideous kind of waste, the progress heavy and slow, no water sometimes for several days together, the draught cattle toiling painfully on while pining with hunger and thirst, now and then one of them lying down totally exhausted, and left to perish; and all the while the burning heat of the sky fiercely reflected by the ground, and no one circumstance in all the elements to alleviate the effect of a temperature of more than a hundred degrees of the thermometer-unless a chill night following such a day may be called relief.

ADVENTURE WITH LIONS.

Among the remarkable incidents in the journey to Griqua Town, was the falling in with a brace of lions, and two different herds of that strange animal, the giraffe. It was indeed only one of the men, advanced somewhat a-head of the waggons, that saw the lions. He

came on them suddenly, and had the fortitude to stand firmly looking at them, till, at the great noise of the approaching waggons, they chose to move away. Our author asserts, we presume much too generally, that " long as you can steadily look a lion in the face, he will not attack you." The giraffes were in the one instance to the number of eleven in a herd; in the other their height is noticed, as being probably, at the head, eighteen feet from the ground. They are harmless and timid animals, and flee at the approach of man.

ASBESTOS MOUNTAINS.

A few stages to the west of Griqua Town, the party found themselves among mountains abounding with asbestos.

"Some of us walked after breakfast to examine the asbestos rocks, where we found plenty of that rare mineral, between strata of rocks. That which becomes, by a little beating, soft as cotton, is all of a Prussian blue colour. When ascending a mountain alone, I found some of the colour of gold, but not soft, or of a cotton texture like the blue; some I found white, and brown, and green, &c. Had this land been known to the ancients in the days of imperial Rome, many a mercantile pilgrimage would have been made to the asbestos mountains in Griqua-land. A considerable portion of it is used in making the roads. It is very remarkable that it is called by the Griquas, handkerchief

stone."

SUPINENESS OF THE BUSHMEN.

The Bushmen do not neglect to infest, with their positions or incursions, the tracts contiguous, on the south side, to the Great River, very far along its course to the west, indeed even to its mouth; but the Corannas have a trifle more of something like proprietorship, though they seem far enough from being ambitious of leaving any proud time-defying monuments of their possession, their only structures being the wretched huts which it would amuse a few of our mischievous school-boys to beat down with sticks. They are of the shape of half an orange, placed with the flat side down, and are, at the highest part, about the height of a man. One of the more considerable of their kraals is thus described:

"They neither sow nor plant, but depend entirely on their

BUSHMEN OF SOUTH AFRICA.

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cattle for subsistence; of course, having no labour to engage their attention, it is probable they sleep away the greater part of their life. They appear to be a dull, gloomy, and indifferent people. Our arrival seemed to make no impression on any mind, except in producing a little curiosity; and they were as indifferent about our departure, as if they had said, You may come, or stay, or go; it is the same to us."

MONSIEUR LE VAILLANT DRUBBED BY A LADY.

66

Arrived within the colony of the Cape, they stopped at the house, or "place," of Mrs. Vandervesthuis, who well remembered the noted Frenchman Le Vaillant having taken his station at her house, from which she said he was never more than ten days absent when he went further up the country, and these he spent among the Kamis mountains opposite, seeking birds, stones, and flowers, which appeared to her very idle employment." To all the pretty incidents in this noted traveller's book, it seems he forgot to add the one which would have made a prettier figure than all the rest:

"Having mentioned to Mrs. Vandervesthuis that Vaillant had published an account of his travels in Africa, and had mentioned her in it, she inquired very anxiously if he had mentioned in his book that she had given him a good drubbing with a sambuk (a kind of whip made of the skin of the sea-cow), when they were travelling together to the Cape, for speaking improperly of her daughters; but, she added, 'had I been alone, he would have given me a drubbing too, but two of my sons were present, both stout young men.' She is a tall, and still a strong woman, though in her seventy-fifth year. While speaking of Vaillant I may venture to say thus much, that though his account has much of the romantic in it, yet he gives the best account of the manners and customs of the Hottentots I have seen."

INTENSE HEAT.

Though at every step still further removed from the peculiar region of the sun's tyranny, they had the thermometer at one time at 101, and at another at 102 when "completely shaded from the sun." He says,―

"My silver snuff-box in my pocket felt as if lately taken out of the fire, though I sat under covert of the tent; all the water

was warm, and our butter turned into oil. Our dogs, though covered from the rays of the sun, lay breathing quick, with their mouths open, and their tongues hanging out, as if in a high fever. My ink, though mixed with water, got thick in a few minutes. All was silence around; the crows were walking about our waggons as if we had been all dead."

The whole party returned to the Cape, with the exception of one man who perished by a Bushman's poisoned arrow, and in as good health as when they set out, our author indeed in much better; and after several months' stay at the Cape he embarked for England, touched at St. Helena, saw the grandeur of a storm on the ocean, and in due time found himself once more at home.

THE SOLITUDES OF AMERICA.*

THIS is one of the grandest of the achievements that have laid open the unknown parts of the globe. To take no account of the immense distance some of the party had to travel, to reach the starting place at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri, they were destined, at setting out from that point, to make a progressive movement to the amount of nearly nine thousand miles before they were to see it again. Add to this, all the lateral excursions and traverses made in hunting, and their examinations, which they prosecuted with a most meritorious and indefatigable industry, of the country to some distance along many of the rivers which fall into the Missouri. It may fairly be assumed as certain, that a very large proportion of this enormous space had never before been marked with the footsteps, nor beheld by the eyes, of any mortal belonging to the civilized tribes of mankind.

Had it been possible for a man of philosophic and imagina

Travels to the Source of the Missouri River, and across the American Continent to the Pacific Ocean. Performed by Order of the Government of the United States, in the years 1804, 1805, and 1806. By Captains Lewis and Clarke. 4to. 1814.