THE LATE DUKE OF CLARENCE IN INDIA.* THIS volume is

dedicated to the Duke whose loss all England, and not England alone, has been so recently deploring. Three years ago, as our readers will remember, the youthful Prince made a tour in Southern India, and now Mr. Rees's narrative of that tour forms an episode in a life that has proved but "the rose's hope while yet unblown " ! A new and painful significance is therefore given to this story of the Duke's visit to one of the most interesting portions of her Majesty's dominions; and some readers will probably regret to find far less about the Royal traveller than about the places which he visited.

The first chapter describes in eulogistic language the King. doss of the Nizam and its capital, Hyderabad, "the most truly

Oriental city in India." The narrative forms a brief historical record of the progress of the State, which, it is said, has im- proved within the last forty years as much as England has improved since the days of the Stuarts. Many are the indica- tions of advance, not only in the Nizam's dominions, but throughout India ; and the author, who can spea'k with no slight authority from his knowledge, not of India alone, but of other Oriental countries, states that the cultivators of the South of India, although undoubtedly poor, are not so poor as they were. It is difficult, of course, for an official to look at the condition of things around him without using what one may call "office-spectacles," and Mr. Rees takes a cheerful view of most of the Indian matters that come under his survey. It is needless to say that the Nizam's welcome of the Duke was in every respect worthy of the occasion, and of a Prince who has given many striking proofs of his friend- liness to our Government. "There is probably no place in the world," Mr. Rees writes, "where ceremonial functions are made so interesting and picturesque as at Hyderabad," and the city itself receives the amplest justice in his glowing description of its charms. It appears that the streets and palaces have not materially changed since the v'sit of the French traveller, Tavernier, in 1652. Not so the beautiful manufactures, which are said to be fast decaying :—

"Never again probably will carpets be Manufactured there worth £100 a square yard, such as once were made, before aniline dyes and quick work destroyed the beauty and leisure of the manufacture. The delicate buckrams which Marco Polo said looked like the tissue of spider's web, and which no King or Queen in the world might not be glad to wear, are not of the present day. Diamonds, sapphires, and other precious stones are not cut and polished in Hyderabad in the nineteenth century as they were in the seventeenth, when diamond-merchants from Prance laboriously spent no small part of their lives in travelling • D.R.H. the Duke of Clarence and Avondale in Southern India. By J. D. Rees. With a "Narrative of Elephant-Catching in Mysore," by G. P. Sander- son. With Map, Portraits, and Illustrations. London : /Evan Paul and Co.

thither. Beautiful inlaid work is still turned out at Bidar. Swords and daggers with ivory and steel handles, inlaid with gold and silver, are still made ; but the country enjoys now no such pre- eminence in working steel as to induce belief in the legend that it was here that men made the chisels which drilled the granite of the great Egyptian pyramids."

In another place, Mr. Rees observes that we see the wood- carving and brass-work of Madura, the lacquer and inlaid

work of Kurnool, and the beautiful mat-manufactures of Tinnevelly, dying under our eyes, and that "from an artistic point of view it is impossible to look upon the establishment of cotton-mills at Bangalore and Tinnevelly as a compensation for the destruction of the lace-manufactures of Madura, of the Palampores of Trichinopoly, and of the 'flowing-water' muslins of Masulipatam." The same deterioration of art- work is, we believe, common throughout the East, and espe- cially in Japan, where the rapid spread of European ideas and customs has had a most injurious effect on the workmanship of native artists.

In the Nizam's dominions, it is said that street-brawls, once so common, are now almost unknown. Hindoos are naturally tolerant, but Mussulmans are not; yet in Hyderabad the social intercourse between them and Europeans is said to be unrestrained, and an Englishman may wander about the city or peep into the precincts of the Great Mosque without risk of outrage. To show the entire want of public opinion,

Mr. Rees states that not long since, his Highness brought out an expert from England to conduct innumerable operations of vivisection (the italics are ours), and he adds that "in a population of (more or less) twelve millions, of which eleven millions are Hindoos, no public feeling was excited against this measure, which involved, whether it be necessary or not, great pain and suffering to animal life, which Hindoos are bound by their religion to respect and cherish."

Writing of the Deccan Mining Company, and of the possi- bility of working large fields of gold and diamonds, Mr. Rees wonders whether provision will be made in the Company's budgets for fees to Brahmins "who charm the tutelary deities who watch over the gems," and he takes no account of the fact that this "important precaution" would be a direct encouragement of superstition. The prospect of discovering new diamond-mines, or reworking old ones, is of less con- sequence than the yield of Indian coal-fields, which is now said to amount to 1,500,000 tons a year ; so that nearly two- thirds of the machinery of the country is worked by indigenous coal.

At Madras, the most unhealthy of all large cities in Asia, if statistics are to be trusted, the Duke had the reception due to his high rank, and for sport, the "royal game" of polo, and the laborious amusement of snipe-shooting. Mr. Rees, whose knowledge of all that pertains to the city and the Presidency is minute and extensive, has much information to convey, in- cluding an elaborate account of polo, which need not detain us now. Let us pass on, as the Prince did, to Mysore, and to the elephant-catching operations arranged in that province for his Royal Highness's amusement by Mr. G. P. Sanderson, who in chapter iv. relates the story of his achievements. On the whole, perhaps this chapter is the most interesting in the volume. For many years wild elephants have been protected in Mysore, as in other parts of India. Lest their numbers should become too large, they are sometimes reduced by capture; and Mr. Sanderson relates that in 1874, under his supervision, fifty. five elephants were captured in one drive, and a handsome profit realised. Once more, after eleven years' experience in Bengal, he was called to Mysore in 1889, and by the help of trained elephants and men, caught a herd of fifty-one elephants within a fortnight after his arrival. It was pro- posed by the Maharajah of Mysore that, if possible, a second catch should be made for the entertainment of the Royal Duke, an amusement involving an infinite amount of labour.

A valley at the foot of the Billigarungu Hills was selected for the keddah or trap ; and when the very extensive and elaborate trap had been prepared, the difficulty was to. bring down a herd from the hills into the valley. Huts sufficient for the accommodation of four hundred men, old friends of Mr. Sanderson in his hunting expeditions, were built four miles from the keddah ; and as the time drew near, parties of hunters were despatched to the hills to watch the movements of the herds. By an extmordi-

nary piece of good fortune, the sight of the natives at once decided the elephants to descend the hills; and "to our de- lighted and almost unbelieving eyes," says the writer, "the whole herd wended its way shortly to the low country." Signals were then fired, which brought the hunters together by degrees; but it was not until the morrow that the men could be all placed at their posts to prevent the egress of the elephants. Great was Mr. Sanderson's anxiety lest the herd should find a weak point and get through the beaters, and, comparing small things with great, he says that he can imagine to some extent the feelings of a commander-in-chief of an army when his forces have been put in motion, and it is almost beyond his power to alter their movements :—

" On this occasion the herd gave little trouble. Beyond one attempt to leave the valley by one of their chief paths to the left, which was promptly frustrated by the yells of the hitherto hiding, silent hunters, yells which must have struck terror into the huge animals, which, in common with all jungle animals, fear the sound of the human voice more than perhaps any other ; also once when they mobbed together near the stream, merely taking breathing. time in their rapid retreat, but on which occasion one of the leading females required a charge of shot in her face as she turned promptly on myself and men when we went to dislodge the herd, —the retreat was one of continued haste on their part, and of success on ours."

No sooner were the gates of the keddah dropped on the im- prisoned herd, than a message announcing the result of the preliminary hunt was despatched to Mysore, a distance of fifty-four miles. For seventeen days the elephants were in captivity, before the arrival of his Royal Highness to witness the driving into a small enclosure and the tying-up of the animals. There was plenty of work to be done meanwhile, including the preparation of a road fourteen miles and a half in length. Great was the excitement and toil in the neigh- bourhood of the keddah. "A canvas city soon sprang into existence; native shopkeepers were established with stocks of rice and other provisions for sale to the camp-followers ; a temporary post-office was opened ; strings of villagers brought eggs, fowls, and sheep for the camp, and a small herd of milk- cows were collected."

Comfortably seated in a tree, the Prince had the pleasure of seeing the elephants driven and secured, an operation described very happily and with much minuteness by Mr. Sanderson. For this interesting narrative we must refer our readers to the volume. One short passage, illustrative of the character of the noble animal, known by none better than the author, is all that our space will allow us to transcribe. Writing of the tame elephants, Mr. Sanderson says These were twelve in number, and were animals which I had sent from Dacca, 1,000 miles away in Bengal, to Mysore some months previously. They were all females except one, and were all highly trained animals that had been employed for years in the Bengal Keddahs with the 150 or more others that formed the staff of Koonkies ' there. ` Koonkies ' is the term applied to the trained elephants, by the aid of which the wild ones are secured ; but the general belief that these exhibit great skill in their work, and even help the hunters of their own accord, has no foundation in fact. They are exceedingly docile, and will allow the men to move about among their huge legs, taking care not to injure them intentionally or by inadvertence, and they will perform such common duties of an elephant as picking up anything they are ordered to, pulling a rope, &c. ; but though I have had the cream of trained elephants at work under my super- vision in Bengal for many years, I can affirm that I have never seen one apply itself undirected to overcome any difficulty, or to prevent any complication. To do so would be quite opposed to the elephant's nature, which is one of repose and contentment ; thus no elephant will continue to labour at any task unless within hearing or sight of its master, nor will it offer to do any work which it is not called on to assist in. An elephant's excel- lent qualities of obedience, patience, and equable temper cannot be overrated ; and when it is considered that its labour is per- formed at times when it would, if left to its own instinct, be resting; also probably in the hot sun instead of in the shade that it loves, its good temper cannot be spoken of too highly."

We cannot close this volume without a word of praise for the attractive form in which it is produced. Twenty-seven photogravures, five portraits, a good map, and a serviceable index, are features of the book which every reader will appreciate.