In Savage Africa. By Verney Lovett Cameron. (Thomas Nelson
and Sons.)—Commander Cameron has, in his new book for boys—an interesting and eminently useful one—attempted to accomplish a little too much. Its second title is "The Adventures of Frank Baldwin, from the Gold Coast to Zanzibar," and is only too accurately descriptive. Frank gets lost in the interior of Africa, and so, in a sense, do the readers of his adventures. No doubt this circumstance will not be objected to by the boy who is very serious in his pursuit of useful knowledge, who prefers the pill to the jam, geography and natural history to romance. But then, the other boy, who does like the jam, who enjoys plot and incident, and revels in seeing hem and villain engaged in a duel, has, we think, some legitimate ground for com- plaint against Mr. Cameron. A first-rate villain figures near the beginning of the story of the name of Palatka, and we seem to have a natural right to expect that he and Frank Baldwin should, after the favourite manner of the late Captain Mayne Reid and James Grant, keep dodging each other in every chapter. For fully half of the story, however, Pentlea is an absentee villain. Bat apart from plot, there is an abundance of exciting incidents, for Frank Baldwin, escaping from Slave-ships and slave-owners, falls, at least in a Renee, from the frying-pan into the fire, as he stumbles into the hands of various African tribes, including one of cannibals. Ultimately he is rescued by friendly Arabs, and after he has had a few stirring adven- tures with buffaloes, hippopotami, and so forth, all ends well. As is suggested by the very names that appear in the book—such as Nyangwo and Tanganyika—Mr. Cameron utilises not only his own adventures in the Dark Continent, bat also, and very properly, Livingstone's, Stanley's, and perhaps even Joseph Thomson's. in Savage Africa is written with commendable care.
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