16 NOVEMBER 1878, Page 21

Our Life and Travels in India. By W. Wakefield, M.D.

(Sampson Low and Co.)—This is a handsome volume, which has all the external advantages that could be desired, and which the writer has exerted himself very creditably to make attractive within. He employs thirty-six pages to take us to India, and devotes about one hundred more to the ethno- logy, history, religion, &c., of the country. The various places to which ho moved aro described in a sufficiently vivid and pleasant style, and there are interspersed sketches of Anglo-Indian life. There is nothing that wo can object to, nor is, indeed, the book other than readable, but it strikes us as being a trifle threadbare and common-place. Most of the subjects of which Dr. Wakefield writes are already familiar ; yet there are new topics to be dealt with. Why, for instance, instead of giving us a brief sketch of about a page and a half on "Indian Medicine," did ho not give us a whole chapter ? Wo should have boon much more obliged than, with all our desire to be civil to a painstaking writer and cultivated man, we can profess to bo for descriptions of Allahabad, Dar- jeeling, and Delhi,—descriptions which we have seen at least as well done before.