SIX BOOKS OF TRAVEL.*

SOLIDITY, sumptuosity, and a wealth of maps, photographs, and other illustrations are the features common to these books. Whether the last is always an advantage to the ordinary reader who takes up a work of travel much as Sydney Smith used to take one up—to get a few hours' enjoy- ment—may perhaps be doubted, because such a feature can scarcely fail to take his attention to some extent from the literary aide of the work. This can hardly be said, however, of the first and finest of the works we have bracketed together. Burmah, which is "the Silken East," owing alike to the character of its scenery and to the splendour of its religious buildings, lends itself to an extraordinary extent to the arts of the painter and the photographer. We do not remember to have seen better or more useful illustrations of both arts than are to be found in this book, accompanying and vivifying the letterpress of Mr. Scott O'Connor. The most imposing illustrations are coloured plates from paintings by Mr. R. J. Middleton, who has studied Burmah very closely ; they present the country from the two standpoints of religious functions, including festivals, and of social manners. Scarcely inferior are some coloured drawings by Mrs. Otway Wheeler Cuffe,

• (1) The Men East. By Scott O'Connor. 2 vols. London : Hutchin- son and Co. [42s.)—(2) The Native Tribes of South-Bost Australia. By A. W. Howitt. London: Macmillan and Co. L215.]—(2) Through Town and Jungle. By William H. Workman and Fanny Bullock Workman. London: T. Fisher Unwin. [21s.]—(4) India. By Colonel Sir Thomas Hungerford

treating chiefly of temples and pagodas. The narrative and descriptive letterpress are no more conventional than the illustrations. Mr. O'Connor writes with the enthusiasm of a genuine lover of what he calls "one of the fairest and most attractive provinces of the Empire," and the "living picture" which he gives of it is based on two periods of residence, and

of travel through a region which in length covers fifteen degrees of latitude. The Burman as seen through Mr.

O'Connor's spectacles is really a remarkable and attractive personality :— "Physically the Burman is for his size one of the finest of men. He is short; but he is well made, broad-chested, stout-

limbed, and muscular Put him on the river he loves, with a swift and angry current against him, and he is capable of superb effort. Turn his craft down stream, with wind and tide in his favour, and he will lie all day in the sun and exult in the Nirvana of complete idleness. And this is not because he is a lazy hound,' but because he is a philosopher and an artist."

The Burman has as a rule a contempt for wealth ; but if

he does amass any, he wishes to put it to what he considers good uses :—

"If any worldly desire survive in his heart it is to win the title of 'Builder of a Pagoda,' or Builder of a Monastery,' titles bestowed upon him by his fellows as an expression of their respect, and dearer to him as implying a spiritual attainment than any magnificence, such as Bearer of a Golden Sword,' that the State may bestow upon him. This vanity is the last infirmity of his mind ; and to the end of his days he is particular that his wife shall address him by his full title, 'Builder of a Monastery.' "

Scenery fares as well as man (and, it must be added, woman) at Mr. O'Connor's hands :—

" The great river Irrawaddy, marshalled by hills and mountains, makes scenery that is as stately as it is beautiful ; as passionate as it is serene. The mountains visited by tropical rains sustain forests of primeval growths in which herds of elephants and rhinoceroses, of wild cattle and deer, wander in comparative peace ; and at their summits, reaching in Mount Victoria a height of eight thousand, and in Saramati a height of twelve thousand feet, there grow the trees and flowers of temperate climates, the oak, the pine, and the violet. In the flat lands of the Delta the largest surplus rice crop of the world is produced ; in the Magok Valley there lie buried the finest of rubies. And, lastly, there is the sea with its infinite variety. All along the coast it runs in a million ramifications into the land, and the traveller for whom such travel has any fascination is borne, as in Aracan, for days through an amphibious world, a bewildering network of creeks in which all comprehension of geography is lost."

Altogether, this is at once the most elaborate and one of the most enjoyable books on Burmal that have ever been published.

Solidity rather than sumptuosity is the leading characteristic of the second work on our list. Dr. Howitt took forty years to collect his material, and ultimately worked in company with Dr. Lorimer Fison, another scientific investigator. This book represents their conjunct wisdom. Dr. Howitt spends, perhaps, too much time in discussing the comparative age of the Australian and Tasmanian races, and in treating of the various hypotheses of their origin. But when he comes to deal with the customs, rites, sexual relationships, and organi- sation of the tribes whose social life has been investigated by Dr. Fison and himself, we find ourselves following—or at

least attempting to follow—a line of scientific investiga- tion which can best be appreciated by students of the

type of the late Mr. Herbert Spencer. Thus believers in primitive marriage will find confirmation of their theory in the practice of elopement, to which the tribe of the Kurnai especially is prone. Primitive communism is also to be found among the tribes Dr. Howitt has lived amongst. The illustrations, consisting mainly of maps and sketches, are quite as valuable as those in "The Silken East," if not so splendid.

The sub-title of the superb volume by William and Fanny Workman summarises it neatly : it is "fourteen thousand miles awheel among the temples and people of the Indian plain." The authors crossed from Ceylon, landed at Tuticorin north-east of Cape Comorin, and proceeded northward chiefly on their bicycles, with which they travelled as many as seventy to eighty miles a day, till they saw practically all the places

of interest in the Deccan and Northern India. Feats of this kind, and also in the way of the consumption of fluids for allaying thirst, such as swallowing three quarts of tea and thirteen bottles of soda in two hours "without causing any marked diminution in the feeling of thirst," are of secondary importance compared with the examination of the ancient architecture of the districts they visited, which was the

original object of their journeys. The various types of art are examined in a spirit which may be gathered from this criticism of "Western narrowness," as exhibited in a con- demnation of the art of the Buddhist and Brahmanic races: --

" Although the temple art of India, like that of other nations, is largely the expression and perpetuation in stone of religious myths and dogmas, and a knowledge of the epics and mythology helps one to understand it, it must be studied from a wider and non-religious standpoint to be fully appreciated. Also, instead of criticising the mediseval temples of India as too modern, as some are inclined to do, one should rather consider with admiration the important and many-sided building art that flourished in that peninsula from four to nine hundred years ago."

This delightful book is filled with photographic illustrations which place the Indian temples almost literally before us.

Sir Thomas Holdich's volume, which belongs to the

excellent "Regions of the World" series, is not so much a book of travels as a geographical treatise by an author who is distinguished alike as a traveller and a diplomatist. He defines India thus :—

"India must be accepted as the whole area of Southern Asia over which British political influence now extends, whether strictly within the limits of the thin red line of British India or beyond it No geographical description of the peninsula of India wpuld be complete without reference to the strange wild hinterland which has exercised such a profound influence on its destinies through all past ages."

Of the five chapters of which this book is composed, not the least interesting are those which deal with the physical

features of India and the adjacent States, because they are to some extent based on the author's personal observations. No doubt readers of a book which depends for its interest less on general statements, and deductions from them, than on details will appreciate what the writer says about railways. They will find the fact, interesting at the present moment, that Sir Thomas Holdich believes that an agreement with Russia is the only means of opening up the overland avenues of approach to India from the west. Only five hundred miles of line—and these not difficult—are required to join Quetta with Kandahar, Herat, and the Transcaspian Railway. "With a definite policy of peaceful intercommunication there will come such a vast impulse to railway traffic as could be achieved by no other projected line in the world." Whatever may be thought of some portions of Sir Thomas's book, it will be found essentially fair-minded and eminently concise.

The name of Dr. Odoardo Beccari, as a naturalist who has made a special study of Malaysia, and who has become

widely known as a theorist in species formation, is tolerably well known. But this account of his wanderings in the forests of Borneo ought certainly to be of interest, as Dr. Guillemard, his English editor, says in his preface, to the

"man in the street." The travels narrated are, it is true, forty years old, but when Dr. Beccari mentioned this fact to

Lady Brooke of Sarawak, whom he met in Florence some time ago, she urged him to prepare his notes of his experiences when he was a young naturalist, on the ground that "the manners and customs of the people, and the very localities which I had visited, are still to-day what they were then,

and, indeed, what they have been from times unknown." Lady Brooke's advice was good. No doubt there are some eminently scientific passages in the volume, but these can be skipped by the "man in the street" and revelled in by the

naturalist. But, as a whole, this account of travel in the region which suggests Dyaks and orang-outangs ought to be enjoyed by any man of ordinary intelligence, for not only did Dr. Beccari come closely in contact with both, but even his theories of "conservative heredity," and of the districts of the world where the anthropoid ape became humanised, are not

at all difficult to understand. But Dr. Beccari has views upon ordinary men and races, as well as upon abnormal head- hunters and orang-outangs. Thus he tells us :—

"Apart from all that is undoubtedly true regarding the use or rather abuse of opium, I have observed generally throughout my wanderings that the principal Chinese merchants, the richest, most influential, and most successful in business, are all great smokers of opium. The vice appears to show its pernicious effects more on the physique than on the intelligence I do not think it unlikely that opium may have contributed to the evolution of new and original ideas in those ancient in- habitants of Central Asia, and that some of the many useful inventions which have come to us from the Far East may have had their first rudiments of existence in the dreamy visions of some opium-eater."

Numerous and admirable photographic sketches increase the pleasure that is to be obtained from reading this book also.

As the title of Mr. James Pinnock's substantial volume indicates, it is a record of globe-trotting. When a writer deals with the West Indies, Mexico, California, Hawaii, Japan, China, Siberia, Fiji, New Zealand, Tasmania Australia, Ceylon, Burmah, India, East Africa, and Egypt, and in the form of notes which are appropriate to a journal, he is hardly capable of doing justice to them all. But Mr. Pinnock and his fellow-traveller, Miss Bates, seem to have had an American "good time" all through their holiday, which, originally intended to last a few months, covered several years. Mr. Pinnock always writes in high spirits, and if his book is not quite so solid—though almost as well illustrated—as some of those in our list, it is very light and readable. It is one of the few books of its class that can be read with pleasure, and not without profit, at odd moments.