TRAVELS IN SPAIN AND THE EAST, 1808-10. By Sir Francis
Sacheverell Darwin. (Cambridge University Press. 6s.)—This hitherto unpublished diary of an adven- turous tour made while the Peninsular War was raging illus- trates afresh the hereditary genius of the Darwins. The author, a sixth son of Erasmus Darwin, who wrote The Loves of the Plants, and an uncle of the great Darwin, was a young Cambridge man of twenty-two when he set out for Spain and Greece. But he was already a qualified physician and a com- petent geologist, and his concise and vivid notes of what he saw are curiously mature. Travel in those days was perilous ; four men who embarked with him on the Corium packet in 1808 were all dead before he returned to Falmouth two years later. At Granada he climbed the Sierra Nevada, " prepared with a bottle of laudanum, nails in my shoes, a hammer and stick," and returned safely with his cherished bit of rock and the empty opium bottle. He stayed at Constantinople and called on the Grand Vizier's deputy, whose luxurious habits impressed him. He visited Troy—or, rather, " the supposed site of the ancient city," which was to wait sixty years longer for its Schliemann—and rode on to Smyrna. Thence he set sail for the Greek islands, and at Syra narrowly escaped from some French privateers, whose ship had just been captured by the British frigate that was to pick him up. On the Acropolis at Athens he found a few cannon mounted ; " and the Turks occasionally exercise their skill by firing at the remaining columns of the Temple of Jupiter Olympius and thus con- tribute with the waste of ages to their destruction."
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