selves believers enough for all this, but we congratulate Mr. Sellon on the facility of his belief. The personification of the powers of generation in their grossest and most obtrusive shape is likely enough to have been an early form of worship among barbarians, and continued by long habit even after these barbarians had become somewhat civilized; but we cannot see the dimmest shade of evidence for concluding that such a form of religion sprang from any one central source.

This, too, we presume, is the first time that "the Ark of the Covenant" has been represented as the obscene emblem of a worship borrowed from the Hindus. The Ark was an oblong square case, which contained nothing but two stone tablets with the autograph writing of the law. In the absence of any graven image it was the emblem of the Spirit of the sole God of the Jews; and here it is imagined the distinct object of the manifold idolatry of India. The intense irrationality of such delirious notions is calculated to provoke wonderment.

We have next a paper "On the History of Anthropology," by T. Bendyshe, M.A., Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. We thus give his titles at full length, seeing that he is the only contributor to the volume that has a title of sufficient distinction to be known to the general public. Anthropology is described in this essay, as it has often been by its followers before, as the "Science of Man," a definition which conveys to understandings not Anthropological a notion as indeterminate as would "Science of Ass or of Horse," or "Science of Cock or Bull." It is either one branch of a knowledge which is not defined, or it is every branch of knowledge whatsoever. Let us suppose it, however, to be a branch or department of natural history. In this sense, and whether called Anthropology or by the somewhat less lumbering names of Ethnography or Ethnology, its history ought to be told in a very few sentences, for it began to be cultivated as a special branch of knowledge not more than forty years ago, some of its first cultivators being still living. Although to be tolerated, perhaps, in a Cambridge scholar, it would seem a labour of unprofitable supererogation to go back for the history of a branch of science to the time of Pythagoras of Samos, or about 2300 years before that science existed. Upon the ancient, the middle age, and even the more modern history, of the non-extant science, the learned Fellow of King's College has wasted some five-and-twenty octavo pages. The remarks of Mr. Bendyshe appear to have been the source of the main topic of the last annual address of the President of the Anthropologists; and, as we have sufficiently disposed of that performance in a previous number of this journal, it is unnecessary to insist further on a subject so utterly aberrant and unfruitful.

Our examination of the volume of Memoirs does not leave us deeply impressed with a sense of the powers of the contributors, or the skill and judgment of the editors. The vessel is over-loaded with dead weight, more likely to swamp it than to speed its course. A dozen pages would have embraced all that is useful in it. It is, however, but a first attempt, and future attempts may prove more successful, provided always that dead weight be thrown overboard.

THE ZAMBESI AND ITS TRIBUTARIES.1

WE have before us here, in a beautiful octavo, the results of the travels of two hardy Scotsmen, the brothers Livingstone, now well known to the world by the fame of the elder, the only Briton, and probably, indeed, the only European, who has ever crossed and recrossed the continent of broad and barbarous Africa. David Livingstone is not only a bold, intrepid, and observant traveller, but a skilful astronomical observer; and his brother is a good naturalist. Both, as we are told in the preface to the work, were accompanied by Dr. Kirk, an accomplished botanist, geologist, and naturalist, whose work on the natural history of Eastern and Central Africa, in course of preparation, we shall be glad to see; for we hold Dr. Kirk to be among the best and most faithful of all those who have made Africa a special study.

The present work is far more carefully written and far better arranged than Dr. Livingstone's former book, and contains also far more information. The most valuable result of the six years spent by Dr. Livingstone and his friends in their laborious investigations consists in their geographical discoveries. They have ascertained that Central Africa is an elevated tableland, with a low, alluvial fringe east and west; a fact foretold by the sagacity of Murchison. The great interior plateau contains great lakes, all the discovery of our countrymen; and two of them the Shivva and Nyassa of Dr. Livingstone. Besides the discovery of these two lakes, Dr. Livingstone and his friends have surveyed the Zambesi, and its tributaries. the Shivé and the Rovumd, altogether greatly extending the geography of Eastern Africa.

We shall here give a sketch of the geography of that portion of Africa which is near the scene of our traveller's investigations, but only as pre

1 Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and its Tributaries. By DAVID and CHARLES LIVINGSTONE. John Murray. 1865.

liminary to the few remarks which we shall have to offer on our own special department, Ethnology. Eastern Africa bears little resemblance to Europe, to Asia, or to the two Americas; and it is even inferior to Western Africa, for it wants its navigable rivers and its harbours; besides being much farther away from the civilized world of Europe, for it can only be reached by doubling the Cape of Storms, or crossing an isthmus and the whole length of the Red Sea. One side of an impenetrated block of solid land, its naked coast wants the great islands and peninsulas of Europe and the splendid archipelagoes of Asia and America. Its human native inhabitants are all Negroes, respecting whom we shall presently have some observations to make, and are few in number; but its wild animals are countless, and many of them monsters in size, both of land and water being; and to them at least the region is eminently fruitful. This is the favourite land of the elephant, the rhinoceros, the zebra, the Cape buffalo, the hyena, the lion, the hippopotamus, and the crocodile; and, whether as varieties or species, they are all peculiar to Africa. In passing a favourite resort of elephants, a marsh called after them, Dr. Livingstone on one occasion counted eight hundred ; and on another occasion he says, "In passing the Elephant Marsh we saw nine large herds of elephants: they sometimes formed a line two miles long."

Not one of the indigenous animals of Africa is amenable to domestication, with the exception of the elephant; and this the Negro has not had the skill to tame, although it has been done by all the races of Asia of whose country the elephant is a denizen, and although the animal would be eminently valuable in a roadless region well suited to it by climate and food. The Negroes of Eastern Africa have domesticated no quadrupeds but the dog, the hog, and the goat; and, like the Mexicans, they are without beast of draught or burden. The ox, the horse, and the camel are absent; and, indeed, in some parts of the country a poisonous fly, the tse-tse, is fatal to them and precludes their presence.

As to the cultivated plants of the interior of Africa visited by our travellers, here is the account which they give of them :-" The native produce cultivated in this the centre of the continent consists of mapira (Holcus sorghum), meshivera (Holcus peronisetum), maize, ground-nuts, underground beans (Vand scia), cucumbers, melons, pumpkins, sweetreed (Holcus sacharatum), sweet potatoes, tobacco, cotton, and Indian hemp, or bango; but wheat, rice, and yams they have never seen. Sugarcane, bananas, and cassava grow in the Barotse valley. Thay have no garden vegetables, nor any of the fruits found near the sea, such as mangoes and oranges, which have been introduced into Africa from other countries."

But even all of the productions here enumerated are not indigenous products of Africa, if by the word "native" indigenous be meant. Thus maize and tobacco are strangers, beyond all doubt; and so most probably are cotton, the sugar-cane, the banana or musa, rice, and even the cassava, or manioc. No people is absolutely stationary; and even the Negroes of Eastern and Central Africa must once have been greater barbarians than we now find them—before the advent among them of Hindus, Arabs, and Portuguese. It is with some of the domesticated animals as with cultivated plants. The rock-pigeon, in a few places, has been introduced, already tamed; and the common fowl has unquestionably been introduced from India, for in Africa it is nowhere found in the wild state. But the gallini, abundant in Central Africa, has not been domesticated by the Negroes, although it was so two thousand years ago by the Numidians of the Mediterranean coast of Africa.

As to the progress made by the Negroes of Central and Eastern Africa, they are even now ignorant of ploughs, harrows, and wheel-carriages; and, indeed, they have no animal to draw them. The Negroes manufacture pottery with the hand, but have not yet reached to the use of the wheel known immemorially to all the nations of Asia,-even to those of the second and third orders of civilization. From a remote time they appear to have acquired the arts of sinelting iron and copper ores, discoveries to which they seem to us to have been led by the excellence and purity of the native ores of both, malachite being that for the copper. "Here," says the narrative, “at every third or fourth village, we see a kiln-looking structure, about six feet high by two and a half or three feet diameter. It is a clay fire-hardened furnace for smelting iron. No flux is used, whether the specular iron, the yellow hematite, or magnetic iron ore is fused, and yet capital iron is produced." Native iron is so good that the natives declare English iron to be "rotten" in comparison, and specimens of African hoes were pronounced at Birmingham to be nearly equal to the best Swedish iron. The savages of the interior of Borneo do the very same thing. They manufacture, by the same simple means, not only good iron, but excellent steel; but the men of the same race-the Malayans--do not continue savages like the Negroes, for, as in the example of the Javanese, we find them advanced to a highly respectable rank in civilization. Over the Mexicans and Peruvians the Negroes of Africa have had the great advantage of possessing iron, and of reducing copper ore to metal; and yet no Negro nation has reached the civilization which these American people had attained when Cortez and Pizarro and their companions first saw them. Like the nations of America, the Negroes are unacquainted with the art of extracting the sap of palms, to be used as a beverage, or to make sugar from; and still more extra

ordinary is it that they are ignorant of the use of oil, of which they have an abundance, for giving light. "The idea of using oil for light," says the narrative, "never seems to have entered the African mind. .

It would be considered a piece of the most wasteful extravagance to burn the oil they obtain from the castor-oil bean and other seeds, and also from certain fish, or, in fact, to do anything with it but anoint their heads and bodies." This may be considered to stand next in stupidity to Montesquieu's savage, who cuts down the tree to get at the fruit.

Dr. Livingstone propounds an extraordinary theory to account for the invention of the arts, which he fancies perhaps may be Scriptural, although we know of no Scripture authority for it, but which, at all events, is assuredly neither logical nor philosophical. "Since," says he, "we find that men who already possess a knowledge of the arts needed by even the lowest savages are swept off the earth when reduced to a dependence on wild roots and fruits alone, it is nearly certain that if they ever had been in what is called a state of nature, from being so much less fitted for supporting and taking care of themselves than the brutes, they could not have lived long enough to have even attained the ordinary state of savages. They could not have survived for a sufficient period to invent anything such as we who are not savages, and know how to make the egg stand on its end, think that we easily could have invented. The existence, therefore, of the various instruments in use among the Africans and other partially civilized people indicates the communication of instruction at some period, from some being superior to man himself." In proof of this singular hypothesis, the Doctor adduces the similarity of form in hammers, tongs, hoes, axes, &c., among rude nations both of Asia and America, as well as of Africa, forgetting that, for the fabrication of all these, iron must have been first discovered, and that in America it was never discovered at all. The truth is that the Doctor is greatly puzzled; and, as the Greeks and Trojans of Homer called in similar cases for the intervention of their gods, he calls for the intervention of a miracle. It is certain, from his taking to this course, that the learned Doctor's reading on such subjects is not extensive. The Andaman islanders are stark naked, and had no cutting instruments, except those made of stone, until wrecked European vessels furnished them with iron, while they fed almost exclusively on shell-fish. The Fuegians are naked, with the exception of a patch of skin, and also feed on shell-fish, and they had lived for ages ignorant of iron. The great miracle was the creation of man with the capacity to accomplish the great achievements to which we have referred. It was a deity, beyond doubt, that performed this miracle, and all the rest followed, from the fabrication of a hoe to the manufacture of a steam-engine.