CURRENT LITERATURE.
My African Home. By Eliza Wingham Feilden. (Sampson Low and Co.)--Mrs. Feilden's experiences date bock thirty years and more (ranging from 1852-1857), and have therefore lost much of their practical interest. Still, they are readable, so fresh and lively is the style in which they are written, and there is something still to be learnt from them. The pressing problems of the Colony are not all solved, and what an early settler observed may prove to be a useful oon- tribation towards the work. There are some interesting notices, too, of Bishop Coleus% the more valuable because they are quite remote from the controversies, religious and political, in which the Bishop was afterwards concerned. We see what an impartial but not un- friendly observer thought of him and his method in his early days, before be had enemies who were incapable of judging him fairly. Mrs. Feilden's judgment was not by any means uniformly favourable. On the polygamy question she decidedly dissented from his views, remarking with much force that a Kaffir chief's wives were rather property than wives, and that the younger men were cruelly debarred from marriage by the monopoly of the women which their elders kept up by their wealth. As to the argument from the supposed destitution of the wives whom the husband, compelled to make choice of one, would have to send away, Mrs. Feilden exposes its futility by the remark that they would have been eagerly sought by suitors whom the polygamio system compelled to remain in celibacy.
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